Something seems to be hunting the teenagers of Asheville’s St. Ambrose High School.
Anne Norris had already lost one child to the seduction of drugs and sex, so it was no surprise that she lived in fear that her younger children would be the next to fall prey. And when students at St. Ambrose High School started dying, it felt like all she could do was pray harder.
Anne’s husband, Dane—a former college and NFL football star—seemed almost oblivious to the terror she felt. For him, everything seemed to be going well. He and his wife had respect, comfort, wealth, and a son who was one of the top D1 recruits in the nation. It felt like the world was theirs.
But who was really in possession?
Set in a fictionalized Asheville, North Carolina, Change of Possession is a sobering tale of sex, drugs, religion, and death surrounding the world of Division One college football recruiting.
The blood of slaveholders and slaves, settlers and natives, indentured servants and patriots mingle in America’s heritage. The rotating wheel of villainy, victimhood, and heroism spins through our history, and to this day we struggle to escape our original sin.
In Colonial South Carolina, Dr. Cyrus Watt has conceived a utopian scheme, born out of personal tragedy and loss. HIs family and friends consider it madness, but he will not be stopped, and the seeds of violence and war that he sows will endure through future generations.
A quarter-millennium later, the Norris family navigates trauma, betrayal, and staggering burdens. Do they, or the people of Asheville North Carolina hear the echoes of the distant past?
Continuing the story of the Norris family begun in Change of Possession, this second volume of The Sheepfold Trilogy ventures into free will, depersonalization, tribalism, and collective guilt.
Can people, or nations, ever escape the sins of their births? Can blood wash away blood? Can men and women ever become innocent again?
The events of a quarter millennium, and the terrible year in the lives of the Norris family, converge in the stunning conclusion to The Sheepfold Trilogy.
When Dan and Tiffany Bowling welcome their orphaned niece Julie into their lives, they could not imagine what she will carry along with her. Constructing a web of outrageous fantasy, she challenges everyone she meets to determine what is true and what is false. But the tale she tells of transforming into a cat... well... that must surely be a lie.
Between the Cherokee legend of the Eh-Wa demon, and the hillbilly stories of the Wampus Cat, there are striking similarities and just as striking differences. But both tales agree: something stalks the woods at night - driving men mad and feasting on dreams.
In the late 1950's, America's most brilliant scientists were assembled to tackle a pressing national crisis: the USA had no answer to Russia's nuclear-powered airplane. In Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in the opening years of the Cold War, many of these scientists toiled away, creating technological marvels at the same time that they built lives for themselves.
Surrounded by the dams and open waters of the Tennessee Valley Authority, they opened lake houses in the summers and closed them in the winters, and as the decades passed they and their families lived their lives only casually aware of the poisons that could never be buried deeply enough. The Cold War and the Culture War both come with their prices, and the martyrs of either are seldom those who deserve their fates.
Everybody loved Jenny Watkins, a good-old-girl from Asheville, NC who made her city proud. She rose from Clyde Cox's Variety Show to become a nationwide Country & Western sensation, before building her own theme park Jennyland on the site of the old Ghost Town in the Sky in North Carolina's Maggie Valley.
For Adam Cruz, Jenny Watkins' parade through the theme park was the perfect place to propose to his girlfriend. He'd been planning for months for the big day, and nothing was going to stop him.
Mortal sin requires three elements - grave matter, full knowledge, and lack of coercion. Even the worst things we do rarely meet all these conditions. But, then, sometimes it is the little sin that has the most deadly consequence.
The Australian Outback produces many dangerous things, but perhaps nothing was so toxic as that awful boy. Flawed from birth, selfish and angry, could he ever live up to the love which others had for him?
In the wake of the Alphabet wars, three technologies - the Neuhaus Engine, the EarHorn, and the S3 Algorithm, enable an LGBT Crew to pilot their faster-than-light spaceship to the nearest habitable planet. What they find there will rattle their foundations and change the course of human history.
Floppy Fish loves his little pond. He knows every weed, every rock, and every delicious shady patch and where the worms will fall in the morning. His world is small, closed, and complete. And then one day a bird poops in his pond, and Floppy Fish must learn the limits of revenge and the terrors of natural law.
Fish admires Bird, and envies the brilliant feathers and the soaring flight of his friend. And Bird admires Fish, and the allure of shiny scales and ability to explore the watery depths. Each longs to be what the other is, but they remain trapped in their bodies. Until a helpful Raccoon, a magic Lizard, and a clever Fox help them realize the possibilities of transformation.
Sam the Squirrel wants to leave his home in Tennessee and take a trip to visit the wonders of California. But Robert Robin, who has flown all about the United States, urges caution. Join Sam and Robert as they anticipate the perils of a visit to America's Golden State.
Hannah Toole never wanted to be a literary agent. She had, like everyone in her profession, hoped to be an author. But she had to pay the bills while she developed her own work-in-progress, and The Manchin Agency turned out to be a great place to work; open, inclusive, diverse, and full of dynamic people that were becoming fast friends. Everything about her life in the city was fresh and resonant. In fact, the only thing that disturbed her general happiness, aside from her lackluster romantic life, was the constant submission of manuscripts that over-relied on narrative. There was nothing that would cause her to reject a query faster than a lack of dialog - too much telling and description and not enough character development. And then she received it. Just another query letter, coming across her screen late in the day. She had a little time before she had to start her commute. Opening the file and proceeding straight to the author's text, her mouth dropped open at the first line, and her comfortable world was torn away in an instant.
Religion is a sop for the masses, a comfortable story we tell ourselves to bring meaning to otherwise empty lives. We populate the void beyond so that it doesn't frighten us, for after all we are only a few steps removed from animals who huddle around a fire in awe of the night.
Unless it isn't. Unless it is incomprehensibly, terrifyingly real.
For Walter Mitchell, this world was all we would ever know, and he had done a good job enjoying it. But an ocean away, the Fourth Secret of Fatima was about to be revealed, and Mitchell would find the weight of the world on his shoulders.
It's the early 1990's, and a group of drunken University of Dayton students decide, at 3AM in a tumble-down house off of Brown Street, that it would be a grand idea to take a road trip to Florida. Nothing of consequence happens, nobody learns any lessons, and that's exactly what they expected. Because they're thirteeners.
When European traders disrupted the culture of the Pacific islands, the goods manufactured in the West turned the Big Man into the Junk Man, with nothing of value to offer. Unable to understand the complexity of the industrial processes which created marvels, the islanders viewed the Europeans as magical interlopers - receiving their goods from the gods though they were unworthy - and they developed complex rituals to ask the gods to bestow their benefices not on the Westerners, but on the Big Man, where they rightly belonged.
In Pleasanton California, the last generation of the Birmingham family dissolves into the bedlam of modern America., rootless and bitter that they have so little, when others have so much. Food, shelter, transportation, entertainment, luxury yachts and iPhones - all should be rightly theirs. With a passion for justice, they seek to make things right.
In Stockton, California, a community organizer, Calvin Wesley, begins a rise to prominence in the African American community. Challenging both systemic racism and a fallen culture, he gathers men of good will around himself. But will the powers of oppression allow this threat to persist?
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