Below is a preview of what I hope will become my next novel.
It’s a project of considerable scope—a Southern Gothic drama steeped in mythic and biblical overtones. Though the title remains undecided and parts of the plot are still taking shape, at its heart is the story of the Cane family: three estranged brothers drawn back to their decaying ancestral home in the wake of their tyrannical father’s death. As they unravel the secrets he left behind, they’re forced to confront not only his corruption, but their own guilt, failures, and the inheritance of ruin he passed down.
Silas Cane was a tyrant.
Feared by all, but especially by those he held close. Man has a tendency to reserve his worst for those he loves—to unleash the flaws buried beneath courtesy and formality upon the ones he should protect. If that tendency exists in most men, in Silas Cane it was law.
His wife, Deloris, died not long after the birth of their third son. She had been a saint—gentle, enduring, and quietly brave. She bore the brunt of Silas’s manipulations with a smile, shielding her sons from the full weight of his wrath. When she died, so too did her protection.
Silas was not a violent man, though he wielded violence when he saw fit. But his restraint came not from virtue—it was born from the absence of necessity. He stood 6’4”, 270 pounds, with hands as broad as a ledger and as heavy as a cast iron skillet. A two-time Golden Gloves boxer and a decorated veteran of the Great War. His voice—a low, deliberate baritone—was laced with something deeper than anger: certainty. The kind that made men reconsider a challenge before it ever left their lips.
But it was his mind, not his fists, from which his cruelty flowed. Cold, cunning, and precise. After Deloris’s death, he turned the full force of his attention on their sons—Robert, Thomas, and Beau—now motherless, unprotected, and ripe for molding.
They were left to suffer the man in full.
Robert Cane had not laid eyes on Cane’s Landing in fifteen years.
Now as his truck crested the final hill and the rusted gate came into view, he felt nothing. No surge of memory, not the fire of hate, or the shudder of fear. Just a cold indifference, holding tight behind the ribs where other men might’ve found the past rising form a shallow grave.
The road narrowed and dipped, and his tires slipped as he rounded the corner, the dirt road still muddy from last night’s rain. Kudzu strangled the weathered fence posts. The trees leaned, their branches stretching across the road in high arch, like a cathedral of emerald and oak. And there in the clearing a head, the plantain house stood—weathered, beaten, sagging, defiant.