PRO CONNECT
I'm either (too) late GenX or (too) early Millennial, depending on how you view these things. It's kind of a lost space in the culture. But here I am. I'm happily partnered to a good guy named Patrick for almost fifteen years.
I write about many things but never shy away from adult themes. NO WINTER LASTS FOREVER, my attempt at a tragic thriller, probably needs a major trigger warning, but I was relieved to see my Kirkus reviewer understood its message and purpose.
I'm deeply appreciative of any and all of my readers and very grateful to Kirkus for providing indie writers with a source for high quality reviews. This industry is very difficult to break into, so thank you for supporting us.
GOOD MAN, GOOD WOMAN, a late sixties romance, coming June 2nd...
“A profound, harrowing examination of violence in the 21st century. (No Winter Lasts Forever)”
– Kirkus Reviews
A historical novel about a romantic courtship during the turbulent late 1960s.
Epps opens his story by introducing the couple at the heart of it as they appear in a photo taken in 1972: a man named Henry Good (“eager, masculine, prideful”) and a woman named Gladys Welson (“elegant, in wide-legged pants, a fitted shirt and cardigan”). They’re both baby boomers: “Their parents before them had been regulated by regional politics, class, education, and ethnicity, forced to put country and family before self. But not these.…They could be only for themselves.” The narrative soon shifts to the year 1968, when Gladys Welson is a senior attending Williamson College in Virginia. She’s a studious, introspective person, absorbed in her studies and the various philanthropic activities of her sorority. However, she’s leery of going on dates as her friends do: “I’m not looking for a man,” she thinks, defiantly. “I’m going to be independent and progressive.” As a result, she’s skeptical when her friend Martha Wainwright invites her to meet her boyfriend’s buddy, a young man named Henry Good, who’s an athlete at nearbyJames County College. She finds Henry to be goofy and approachable (although the narration somewhat confusingly describes him as “too well mitigated by fear and honor to be defiant”), but their first meeting doesn’t seem to guarantee a future for them together. The novel goes on to follow their relationship as Gladys and Henry each go through a series of setbacks and achieve insights
The author does an effective job of evoking the various concerns and attitudes of the late ’60s. Henry and Gladys experience the shock of the Rev. Martin Luther King’s assassination, and they go about their days and attend classes as the Vietnam War rages overseas; one of Henry’s friends shipped out and was killed, and he feels that he should enlist in order to honor his friend’s memory. Epps also skillfully develops his main characters, following Henry as his feelings for Gladys grow increasingly complex and tracing Gladys’ father’s descent into alcoholism. Throughout, the story moves forward at a smooth pace. However, it’s occasionally muddied by purple prose: “She wandered flagrantly among the birthing influence of daydreams, thoughts born of a cataract churning outward at its base and into the pool of spirit.” (At another point, the narration notes that “Days fell through and behind thoughts, their essences dispersed in revolutions around the sun.”) Such discordant flourishes can be distracting, but the main currents of the story will keep readers engaged. Henry’s experiences in the armed services are compelling, as his idea of duty conflicts with his natural state of insecurity; here, he assesses himself as an officer: “not a real one. A trained one. An untested one. A nervous one.” Equally striking are the author’s evocations of war: “The Americans were outdone by a jungle, bewildered by its twists and turns, where death with a hoary growl would snatch and snag and swipe, ripping men out of time.”
An unevenly executed but quietly confident love story.
Pub Date:
Page count: 270pp
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2020
Epps chronicles the damage wrought by a broken family in this third installment of his American Wrath trilogy.
Charles “Chuck” Hardy is struggling: his 4-year-old son Brian has begun to display some tendencies that indicate he may have attention deficit disorder and is perhaps autistic, too; simultaneously, Chuck finds himself trapped in a loveless marriage to Samantha (“Sam”), a former airline stewardess he married after impregnating her during a one-night stand in the mid-1990s. As she carries on a series of affairs, Chuck loses himself in the twin distractions of working and drinking. Brian, a loner and outcast from the start, has a few nerdy friends when he reaches high school, but even among those few companions, he is too shy to fully describe an unsettling situation that bedevils him: For a while now, he’s been followed around by a woman in a mysterious black Mercedes. Brian steadies himself enough to earn a partial scholarship to a state school a few hours from home. There, he again struggles socially, spending most of his freshman year quietly stalking a girl named Brandy. Though she disappears for a time, she reappears seemingly from nowhere in his senior year, and the two begin dating. Readers soon learn she’s after Brian for the protection she thinks he might offer on her post-collegiate cross-country journey to drum up Instagram followers and propel her to influencer stardom. While Brian’s parents sink further into their separate miseries, the relationship between Brian and Brandy deteriorates frighteningly, and readers discover that Brian was a victim of childhood sexual abuse—a pattern he reinforces by sexually assaulting Brandy during their trip.
Smoothly written and alluringly-paced, Epps’ third novel succeeds largely on the basis of its character development. Though Chuck is something of a flaccid, passive actor in his own life, readers grow sympathetic toward him once they meet his own useless father; sympathy for Brian is engendered in much the same way. The women in this novel are, perhaps, a bit less fully realized, as Brandy veers into a vanity-obsessed stereotype and Sam feels, at times, like a one-dimensional serial adulterer. Nevertheless, Brian and Chuck will keep readers engaged, warts and all. The author’s flair for description—“Down the highway, lit like a stroke of genius, a white stab of the sun bleached [Brian and Brandy’s] sightline”—peppers the work with memorable lines and genuine originality. Readers in search of a fast-paced page-turner may not find enough here to keep them flying through, but fans of a more literary approach will appreciate Epps’ well drawn characters. While “road” novels are an American tradition and therefore a somewhat crowded field, this work manages to distinguish itself by marrying that tradition to the modern experience of social media and the ways in which Gen Z desperately seeks to monetize their looks and a highly-curated, overly-romanticized, fantasy-driven lifestyle for recognition and remuneration. Finding oneself invested in characters with such glaring flaws is sure to be a satisfying reading experience for those who take the plunge.
A dark, literary family saga played out across the open road with characters readers won’t want to leave behind.
Pub Date:
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2024
A survivor of human trafficking tries to escape her old life.
At the heart of this novel by Epps is a young woman named Ava Rose Anderson who spent years in the clutches of charismatic figure and nefarious human trafficker Jeffrey Hoffman, the book’s Jeffrey Epstein–like villain. “Hoffman had held her captive for just over four years until she escaped that life at eighteen,” the narrative reads. “In the first few years of her escape, she’d had as much therapy as she could tolerate.” But the anxieties and dark thoughts of her time sealed in Hoffman’s “coterie of crass” still haunt her as the story opens, years later, when she’s living comfortably in Florida with her boyfriend, Caleb, in a quiet life that seems every bit as wholesome as her previous life was sordid. At one point, Ava’s friend Piper, who’d also been trafficked by Hoffman, joins Ava in reflecting on the life they’re both hoping they’ve left behind. “You just do it ‘cause it starts off fun and exciting,” she reflects. “And everyone is rich and offering you nice things and amazing places to go, and all you have to do for it is, is that.” Epps’ narrative shifts back and forth in time, at some points ranging to years past in order to show Hoffman at the peak of his power (and Ava in the depths of her misery) and, at other points, ranging to the present, when Hoffman is disgraced and dead but his former top lieutenant Maxime Bredwell is alive, at large, and generally unrepentant (“No one would have dreamed that she loved a good grift,” readers are told. “She’d laugh to herself in bored moments at how utterly naive people could be”). When Ava decides to find the elusive Maxine and confront her, the narrative takes off.
Epps writes this story as a fictionalized version of what might have happened if one of the young human trafficking victims of Jeffrey Epstein and his assistant, Ghislaine Maxwell, had been able to take matters into her own hands. The novel effectively depicts the world of Jeffrey Hoffman as well as the psychology of someone like Maxime Bredwell, who’s under close surveillance by an experienced retiree from the military. The decision to continually toggle the novel’s chronology to tell Ava’s and Hoffman’s overlapping stories is a risky one, and some of the dangers are obvious here. The shifts often feel more distracting than dramatically effective. Another gripe is the failure of Ava to ignite as a dramatic creation. Even when she’s upending her settled life and beginning to take major chances in her quest to right some wrongs, she seems fairly flat on the page. “Self-pity threatened to overwhelm her project,” readers are told in a typical characterization of Ava’s mental state. “Untethered and so completely unsettled, she doubted.” Epps has his eye on a larger revenge plot, but the novel’s action builds too slowly.
A topical but sometimes stodgy thriller about the hunt for a human trafficker.
Pub Date: April 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-57-889737-0
Page count: 231pp
Publisher: Mess Hall Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2024
In this debut novel, a man becomes obsessed with tracking the online identity of a person who may be behind a string of shootings.
When 50-something Jack Warner hears of a tragic shooting at a local Missouri high school, he’s angry. Though the transportation logistics analyst has no kids, the violent event triggers his outrage over such things as corrupt businesses and “soulless” news broadcasts. But he’s even more distraught by what he sees on his 23-year-old nephew Luke’s computer screen. Luke is using EasyChat, the same online group the high school shooters utilized, and it seems the individuals in a particular chat room are championing the boys’ lethal actions. Jack asks his nephew for the chat room’s password and zeroes in on the moderator, who goes by the handle Fonzie. Jack tracks Fonzie on other sites, like Instagram, and is gradually fascinated by the grisly, deviant content of these online discussions. Then there’s a series of shootings, including at a nearby mall, and Jack believes he may already have his eyes on the person responsible. His obsession grows, as he gains illicit access to police records so he can follow the official investigation and purchases a weapon of his own—not a handgun, but a sniper rifle. Jack is on morally shaky ground since he’s not quite sure how connected Luke is to the group. But he may be in physical danger as well, as it’s easy for any of the chat-room regulars, especially the shooter, to pinpoint his IP and home addresses. Epps’ grim novel is an incisive look at people’s responses to violent tragedies. Jack, for one, toys with the notion of vigilantism, which fortunately the story never glorifies. In fact, in an early scene, Jack’s encounter with “thuggish-looking fellas” outside a convenience store fails to take the perilous turn he apparently anticipates. While Jack’s behavior borders on paranoia over gun-toting teens, it’s clear he’s also attempting to understand those disturbed enough to resort to mass murder. That’s why he initially frequents the chat room and makes efforts to reach Luke, whose angst is palpable. At the same time, the author deftly contrasts Jack with Kathy Cray, a teacher he worked with when he was in the same profession. Back then, her method of handling a troubled male student was to treat him as a problem to be discarded rather than getting the boy help. Epps smartly incorporates social media into the plot and criticizes the users more than the sites themselves. For example, Jack’s online presence ultimately strains his relationship with his girlfriend, Penny Grierson, which he rightly blames on his obsession. His chronic despondency carries over to the arresting but bleak prose. In one instance, he stands on his porch listening to “the sounds of the night” before imagining “people out there in the darker shadows, some dragging their feet like the walking dead, some scanning like predators, some cowering like victims.” Though most readers will predict a plot turn in the final act, two other twists are genuinely shocking and only further the narrative’s somberness.
A profound, harrowing examination of violence in the 21st century.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-61739-8
Page count: 224pp
Publisher: Mess Hall Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2020
Day job
used to be a teacher
Favorite author
From Melville, Elliot, and Mann to Ellison, Morrison, and Zadie Smith - MANY MORE
Favorite book
Too many...
Favorite line from a book
"But oppositions have the illimitable range of objections at command which need never stop short at the boundary of knowledge, but can draw forever on the vasts of ignorance." - Middlemarch
Favorite word
like
Passion in life
honest, unafraid people & art
Unexpected skill or talent
home cook
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