Shadowman

MAY 22, 2016
The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes has always stayed with me. When I was a child, the poem gave me thoughts of some  "thing" lurking in the darkness. Those thoughts remain to this day. Any time I drive the back roads, passing expanses of trees, I see shadows. My imagination brings life to these shadows in the woods. The novel Shadowman emerged from these twists of imagination.

Shadowman takes place in the fictional city of Brettinger, Tennessee. I chose to call the city "Brettinger" because I enjoyed the way it sounded in my thoughts. Brettinger feels small, but important.

The city has grown over the years, as have many small towns, expanding to accommodate the wealthy while leaving some neighborhoods behind. Lakewood is a neighborhood left in the wake of Brettinger's growth and the focal point of the book. Once home to Brettinger's elite, Lakewood's once stately homes are in need of repairs that may never come.  The money has chosen to follow a different path, leaving the elderly, and any citizens who don't fit a certain "type" to deal with what may come. 

Underlying the story is a political cover-up held for years. An environmental disaster had once threatened the welfare of every citizen of Brettinger. Money was allocated to solve the crisis, but some was held back. Who would ever notice if "those people" in Lakewood were a bit less healthy and their children a bit behind in school. They were the old and infirm, the poor white trash, the blacks and hispanics. They were those people.

I chose the name "Lakewood" as the target neighborhood because the name felt familiar (I graduated from Lakeview-Fort Oglethorpe high school).

The myth contained in Shadowman was created from my childhood nightmares, from the tales my patients have told over the years, and from my love of the works of Tony Hillerman. The backstories and histories in Shadowman are an amalgamation of my own thoughts and experiences and of the life stories of my patients over the past fifteen years. 

Shadowman has been entered in a fiction contest under the title Brettinger

The reason for the change and re-release is to separate the work from the numerous other books of the same title.

I will post ordering information for the new title when it becomes available.

RwriterN : The writer inside