Seeing Crows

Suffocating in the rural ditches of upstate New York, a troubled drop-out struggles to deal with the sudden death of his best friend, a crumbling relationship to the woman he lives with and the secrets that tie them all together.

An ex-con takes him under his wing where they work the night shift together at a coffin factory and they embark on a series of increasingly criminal endeavors fueled by booze and drugs.

Propelled by his desire for a girl working in the factory office, he launches down a reckless path that divides good intentions from bad, pursuing gratification, and eventually self-preservation, over friendship or honesty.

As the consequences of his apathy catch up to him, he scrambles to keep out of the tide of trouble, even while friendship becomes harder to recognize, or prove, and the truth harder to speak, or hide.

Darkly humorous, Seeing Crows recounts the criminal conversion of a young man, pathologically indifferent and oppressed by economic and cultural isolation. A story about moral complexity, and complicity, amongst people who do not even begin to think in those terms, Seeing Crows explores the fleeting nature of friendship and honesty in a world not much concerned with the fortune of a delinquent at the bottom of the food chain.

If Harry Crews' Feast of Snakes and John Barth's The End of the Road had a discarded bastard child raised by Russell Banks' Rule of the Bone, it would probably look like Seeing Crows.

This Kindle version also includes a large excerpt from "Twitch of the Death Camp," by the same author.