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The Cost Of Privilege
The Perils of Privilege centers around an ambitious young Black advertising professional whose long-awaited career breakthrough comes with unexpected strings attached. Where did the idea behind this novel come from?
The novel did not begin with a single incident so much as with a long accumulation of questions—questions shaped by my own life as an African American, by years of teaching and writing about African American culture and literature, and by the conversations I have had in elite American universities about race, language, and belonging.
As a professor, I have often returned to the language we use to describe racial discrimination. For many years, words such as racism and prejudice carried the weight of that discussion. They named exclusion, hostility, and abuse of people of color; they also suggested, in many cases, conscious intent. But when the word privilege began to circulate more widely to name essentially the same kind of behaviors, I found myself drawn to it because it seemed to name something more elusive.
Privilege, as I began to think about it, did not simply describe open hostility or deliberate acts of discrimination. It pointed instead to the quieter and often unacknowledged ways racial advantage moves through institutions, relationships, and everyday assumptions. It made visible a form of harm that can be produced not only by what people intend, but also by what they fail to question.
That tension became the emotional and intellectual center of the novel. I was especially interested in what happens to African Americans who believe that education, discipline, and achievement will protect them from racial bias, only to discover that those protections are partial and fragile. Through fiction, I wanted to examine how privilege operates not as an abstract concept, but as a lived reality—shaping ambition, opportunity, self-understanding, and the relationships people form with one another. The novel grew out of that desire to dramatize the unseen forces that influence our choices, and to ask what happens when well-intentioned people become participants in systems they have not fully learned to see.
What misconceptions about privilege were you hoping to challenge?
In The Perils of Privilege, I wanted to trouble the easy assumption that privilege is a kind of shelter—something that fully and permanently protects all people from the harsher weather of American life.
Privilege can open doors, soften certain blows, and create the illusion of safety, but the novel asks what happens when that safety proves conditional, fragile, or incomplete.
Damon, an African American, enters the world believing, as many Americans are taught, that achievement can serve as a shield. He has the markers of success: a middle-class upbringing, an Ivy League education, and the promise of a professional future. Those accomplishments give him confidence, but they also leave him vulnerable to a particular kind of disillusionment. In the White-owned advertising firm where he works, Damon discovers that accomplishment does not release him from the meanings others attach to his race. The contradiction at the heart of his life is that he has done everything he was told would matter, only to learn that it does not matter in the same way for everyone.
I was also interested in the quiet danger of privilege within Black life itself. Relative advantage can nurture ambition and self-possession, but it can also distance a person from realities they have not yet been forced to confront. For Damon, privilege does not make racism disappear; instead, it delays his reckoning with it. When that reckoning arrives, it is not only social or professional—it is deeply interior, unsettling the story he has told himself about who he is and how the world works.
In that sense, the novel is less interested in condemning privilege than in revealing its limits. I wanted to create characters—Black and White—who move through the world with assumptions they do not fully examine, and who must eventually face the consequences of that blindness. Privilege, in the novel, becomes perilous not simply because it exists, but because it can persuade people that they understand more than they do, and that they are safer than they are.
Many of the book’s biggest moments come through conversation rather than action. What appeals to you about dialogue-driven storytelling?
I will begin by saying that, as a writer, I do not find “dialogue-driven storytelling” any more appealing than other ways of telling a story. I approach each of my novels with the intention of finding the most effective way to present the story I want to tell. For that reason, I do not tend to separate conversation from action too sharply. For me, conversation is itself a form of action: it can reveal motives, shift power, expose conflict, and alter the direction of a story. In some cases, dialogue is not a substitute for action but the most precise way for action to occur.
While I do not necessarily agree with the assertion that “the book’s biggest moments come through conversation rather than action,” I agree that dialogue plays an important role in telling Damon’s story. What appealed to me about dialogue in this novel is its ability to reveal character and relationships while allowing the story to unfold through people’s interactions. In many of my stories, what characters say—and, just as importantly, what they choose not to say—can expose assumptions, prejudices, fears, aspirations, and conflicts that might otherwise require extensive narration to explain. Conversation also allows readers to experience those discoveries as they happen rather than simply being told about them afterward.
This is particularly important when writing about African American life and culture, where much of the experience is embedded in how people understand, negotiate, and talk about the world around them. A conversation can reveal differences in generational experience, social position, racial consciousness, or personal circumstances without my having to explicitly explain them to the reader.
So, while I would not describe myself as a “dialogue-driven” writer, I do value dialogue as one of the most effective tools available to a novelist. When it serves the story, conversation can carry enormous dramatic weight, especially in a novel involving traumatic events. A few people sitting and talking can sometimes produce more consequential change than an elaborate physical action because, by the end of the conversation, someone may see themselves, another person, or the world around them differently. For me, the question is not whether a story should be driven by dialogue or action, but which form of action best serves the story I am trying to tell.
What do you hope readers are still thinking about a week after finishing The Perils of Privilege?
I hope readers are still thinking about the word privilege itself—how easily it is used, how fiercely it is resisted, and how complicated it becomes when we are asked to locate it in our own lives. One of the questions at the heart of The Perils of Privilege is not simply who has privilege and who does not, but what privilege allows us to see, what it allows us to ignore, and what it may cost us not to examine it honestly.
A week after finishing the novel, I would like readers to be unsettled in a productive way. I want them to think about the privileges they may benefit from—racial, economic, educational, social, professional—and also about the ways they may have been harmed by the unexamined privileges of others. Those two realities often exist side by side. A person can be wounded in one context and advantaged in another; they can understand exclusion deeply and still fail to recognize the doors that have opened for them. That tension interests me because it resists easy moral categories.
I also hope readers are left thinking about responsibility. The novel is concerned with the perils of being privileged, but it is equally concerned with the pitfalls of living in the path of someone else’s privilege. Privilege becomes dangerous when it is mistaken for innocence, merit, or immunity from consequence. It can distort relationships, cloud judgment, and make people complicit in harm they do not intend to cause. If readers find themselves asking, Where have I been protected? Where have I been blind? Where have I made assumptions about someone else’s life?, then the novel has continued to do its work beyond the final page.
Ultimately, I do not want readers to leave the book with a single conclusion so much as with a sharper set of questions. Fiction gives us the opportunity to inhabit complexity without rushing to resolve it. My hope is that The Perils of Privilege stays with readers as an invitation to examine the stories they tell themselves about fairness, success, injury, and accountability—and to consider how those stories shape the way they move through the world.
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Josh Ford works at the same firm, yet has a vastly different past. He grew up in the projects and was educated at a historically Black college. Despite their differing backgrounds, the two become inseparable, sharing morning coffees and dreams. When Damon’s supervisor unexpectedly offers him a high-profile project, he assumes it’s a reward for his talent and hard work. He couldn’t be more wrong as he distances himself from Josh to prepare for the important presentation, leaving the friendship in jeopardy. When Damon is eventually promoted, he discovers two painful truths that reveal the complex and insidious workings of power and privilege in society.
In this thought-provoking story, a young Black man who believes he is on track to attaining professional success soon learns that unearned privilege can destroy both career aspirations and personal relationships.
The Perils of Privilege
John W. Roberts’s The Perils of Privilege is a workplace drama and social novel centered on Damon Richardson, an ambitious young Black advertising professional whose long-awaited career opportunity comes with hidden conditions. The story begins with Damon preparing for a major presentation, convinced that his talent and hard work have finally earned him the attention of his employer. What initially looks like a straightforward promotion story develops into a wider examination of race, class, friendship, corporate ambition, and the complicated ways privilege operates within Black communities as well as across racial lines.
The novel’s most compelling relationship is the friendship between Damon and Josh Ford, two Black colleagues who have comparable professional abilities but very different backgrounds and ways of moving through the world. Damon is polished, cautious, and shaped by an affluent upbringing, while Josh is outspoken, culturally expressive, and more familiar with economic insecurity and overt prejudice. Their conflict gives the book its emotional center because it turns the idea of privilege into something personal. Damon’s advancement doesn’t simply create professional tension. It forces both men to confront assumptions, resentments, and gaps in understanding that had always existed beneath their friendship.
The book reminded me of Zakiya Dalila Harris’s The Other Black Girl, particularly in its interest in predominantly White workplaces and the pressure placed on Black employees to perform an acceptable version of identity. Harris approaches those subjects through satire, suspense, and horror, while Roberts uses an expansive, character-driven drama with lengthy conversations and several points of view. His style is more direct and reflective, often allowing characters to explain their beliefs in detail. That makes the novel feel like a family discussion, an office debate, and a moral inquiry unfolding at the same time. The shifting perspectives are especially useful because Damon’s opportunity looks very different when seen through the eyes of his supervisor, his friends, and Damon himself.
The Perils of Privilege is a coming-of-awareness story about a man learning that achievement and self-knowledge don’t automatically arrive together. Damon’s professional crisis becomes the push he needs to examine the advantages he has taken for granted and the people he has failed to understand fully. The novel’s large cast, conversational energy, and attention to workplace politics create a full social world around that realization. Roberts ultimately presents privilege as a responsibility, and Damon’s growth feels meaningful because it includes accountability, damaged relationships, and the difficult work of becoming more honest with himself.
Pages: 218 | ASIN : B0FTS6NYC8
Ultimate Test of Faith
Eclipse: The Silence of Heaven centers on a warrior known as the Holy Avenger who faces a city that has mistaken silence for divine judgment. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The entire novel started with one historical fact. I was reading about the volcanic winter of 536 AD, when the sun was dimmed for roughly eighteen months. Historians have called it one of the worst times to be alive. Crops failed, famine spread, disease followed, and entire civilizations struggled to survive.
My first thought was, “What a perfect time for vampires to thrive.”
But as I dug deeper into the period, I realized something even more interesting. Religion was at the center of everyday life. People looked to God for answers, protection, and hope. When the sun disappeared and the world seemed to be falling apart, I started wondering how people would react if they believed Heaven had simply gone silent.
Some would lose their faith. Others would cling to it even more fiercely. Then I added vampires to the equation, creatures that had suddenly inherited a world without sunlight, and it became the ultimate test of faith. What happens when everything you believe about God, good, and evil is challenged by the impossible?
That’s where Eclipse was born. The historical event gave me the setting, but the characters and their responses to that silence became the heart of the story. It’s a novel about faith, doubt, sacrifice, and the choices people make when they can no longer tell whether Heaven is watching.
The novel explores what people do when they believe their prayers go unanswered. Why did that idea become the emotional center of the story?
I think everyone has experienced a moment where they’ve prayed for something and the answer never seemed to come. Whether you’re religious or not, we’ve all had times when we’ve wondered if anyone was listening.
In 536 AD, people didn’t have science to explain why the sun disappeared. Their faith was their foundation. They looked to God for meaning, protection, and hope. When the world descended into famine, plague, and darkness, I couldn’t help but wonder how they reconciled that with everything they believed.
That’s why unanswered prayer became the emotional center of Eclipse. Every major character responds to Heaven’s silence differently. Some lose their faith. Some become angry. Some convince themselves God has abandoned them. Others continue believing even when they have every reason not to.
Then I introduced vampires into that world. They don’t just threaten people’s lives. They challenge everything people believe about God, good, evil, and salvation. The monsters become the external conflict, but the real battle is happening inside each character.
Which aspect of Veyne’s character proved the most difficult to write?
Veyne was by far the most difficult character to write because I wanted his relationship with faith to feel authentic. It would have been easy to make him either completely lose his faith or remain unwavering from beginning to end. Real life usually isn’t that simple.
At his core, Veyne is still Brother Sebastian. That part of him never truly disappears. He’s a man who has witnessed unimaginable horror, carries tremendous guilt, and questions God more than once, but he never completely abandons the man he once was.
Finding that balance was the hardest part. I wanted readers to understand why he struggled without ever feeling like he had become someone else. His doubts are real, his anger is real, but so is the compassion, humility, and sense of duty that defined Brother Sebastian from the beginning.
I think that’s what makes him relatable. Faith isn’t the absence of doubt. Sometimes it’s choosing to keep moving forward even when you don’t understand why God seems silent. That, more than anything, is Veyne’s journey.
How do you see Eclipse fitting within the tradition of religious horror?
I think Eclipse fits within religious horror, but it approaches the genre from a different direction. A lot of religious horror focuses on possession, demons, or the conflict between good and evil through the lens of the Church. Those stories can be fantastic, but I wanted to explore something different.
In Eclipse, the horror doesn’t begin with evil. It begins with silence. The greatest fear isn’t that God doesn’t exist. It’s that He does, but He isn’t answering.
I also wanted faith to be more than a backdrop. It’s the emotional foundation of the novel. Every major character has a different relationship with God, and the darkness exposes who they really are. Some lose hope, some become consumed by fear, and others discover a faith they never knew they had.
The vampires are certainly the monsters of the story, but they’re also a way of asking much bigger questions about suffering, sacrifice, redemption, and what it means to keep believing when everything around you suggests you’ve been abandoned.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Amazon
For centuries, Sanctum Eterna has stood as the last fortress of divine order. Its towering cathedrals, sacred covenants, and ancient vows have kept darkness at bay—or so its people believed.
Then the eclipse arrives.
As the kingdom descends into chaos, Veyne, a battle-hardened hunter burdened by doubt, is drawn into a war older than history itself. Across the battlefield stands Seraphine, once destined to become humanity’s salvation, now transformed into the most feared force the world has ever known after betrayal shattered everything she believed. Behind them both waits Kharion, an ancient being determined to erase the boundary between heaven and oblivion.
Haunted by forgotten prophecies, cursed bloodlines, sacred relics, and impossible choices, heroes and monsters collide in a breathtaking struggle where loyalty is tested, faith is broken, and redemption comes at an unimaginable cost.
Rich with gothic atmosphere, unforgettable characters, and cinematic action, Eclipse blends dark fantasy, supernatural horror, epic battles, and emotional storytelling into an unforgettable reading experience.
Perfect for readers who enjoy:
Dark epic fantasy
Gothic fantasy
Supernatural horror
Religious mythology
Vampire fiction
Monster hunters
Grimdark fantasy
Character-driven fantasy
Dark romance undertones
High-stakes fantasy adventures
When heaven falls silent…
Who will remain?
Hard Times: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Nathan ‘The King Cobra’ Washington
Hard Times: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Nathan “The King Cobra” Washington, by M. Anthony Phillips, opens as a search story and widens into something far larger: a young magazine writer tracks down a vanished heavyweight champion, only to uncover a life marked by sharecropping poverty in Georgia, racist terror, war service, boxing glory, mob pressure, flight, reinvention, and old grief that never quite cooled. What begins as a sports mystery becomes a multigenerational saga about what a man loses when history corners him and what, against reason, he still manages to keep.
I appreciated the way Phillips portrayed Nathan’s emotional depth, instead of just listing things that happened to him. The early scenes of his family, the long shadow of Jim Crow, and the bruising detours of his adulthood give the novel a rough-hewn earnestness that suits its subject. I felt the book reaching not for polish so much as amplitude. It wants to tell the whole thing: ambition, lust, fear, tenderness, humiliation, pride. Nathan isn’t presented as an emblem or a sermon. He’s a battered, desirous, stubborn human being, and the book is strongest when it trusts that plain, unsanitized fact.
The prose can swing from vivid to blunt. Yet even when it can be melodramatic, I rarely felt indifferent. There’s a kind of unvarnished conviction here that kept me reading. I was especially struck by the book’s sense of aftermath: Nathan doesn’t simply vanish into legend; he survives into obscurity, sorrow, compromised second chances, and a late-life reckoning that is more melancholy than triumphant. That choice gave the novel a mournful aftertaste I found compelling. It refuses the easy coronation. It is more interested in the cost of surviving than in the glamour of winning.
I would recommend Hard Times to readers of sports fiction, historical fiction, and Black historical drama who want a big, old-fashioned story told with bruised sincerity rather than minimalist cool. Readers who respond to sagas of struggle, war, race, boxing, family, and redemption will likely find a great deal to hold onto here. In spirit, it sometimes feels closer to the broad emotional sweep of Walter Dean Myers or the combative American mythmaking around boxing narratives than to sleek contemporary literary fiction. Hard Times is not a delicate novel, but it is a heartfelt one, and its best blows land with the weight of a life fully lived.
Pages: 384 | ASIN : B00AA3PGRE
Strategy, Focus, and Concentration
Readora From BookTropolis is an engaging alphabet book for young readers that presents each sports-related letter through haiku-style verses framed by the tale of Readora, a reading superhero. What drew you to using haiku-style verses for each sport?
I have been writing poetry since childhood. Haiku is a style of written communication that allows a person to say a lot with few words. Kids have short attention spans, so telling a story or teaching lesson plans in short rhythmic form is an easier and more fun approach to reaching them rather than straight conversation. Plus, an impactful or sensible haiku statement (poetry/rap) is easy to remember. Also, my voice is Readora’s voice in the readings.
Do you have a personal favorite sport featured in the book?
My favorite sport in the book is chess because it requires critical thinking, strategy, focus, and concentration. These are life-long skills that children can learn as youngsters and apply to everything they do in the future.
The artwork in your book is wonderful. Can you share a little about your collaboration with illustrators Heyjuly and Kesab Karmakar?
I found both illustrators on a design platform and posted an RFP of my requirements. More than 20 artists sent designs. The first request was for the Readora from BookTropolis character. Among other specifications, I provided a younger photo of myself so the character can be created in my image. Intellectual property rights are critical, so I wanted to ensure that my face is the only one the designers would reference. All other designs were created based on the content of each sport in the book, with the use of AI prompts, with Kesab Karmakar contributing several sports illustrations as well.
How do you hope parents, teachers, or librarians will use this book with children?
This book is the first in a series of books called the Readora from BookTropolis Learning Series. The intent is for parents, teachers, and librarians to use this book and all others to come as a method of teaching younger readers their alphabet, introducing them to various sports, both traditional and those not as well known, and through the haiku style of writing, teaching children to read and comprehend while viewing the vibrant illustrations.
Author Links: GoodReads | YouTube | Facebook | Website | Amazon
IYSH
IYSH is a historical fiction novel that begins in 1940 Germany with Leo Butlion, a Jewish medical student whose worst fears about Nazi violence become real with terrifying speed. From there, the story widens into a long wartime and postwar saga that follows Leo and Ivy through persecution, separation, survival, reunion, family life, and careers that eventually carry them far beyond Europe, into Israel and South Africa. It’s a big novel in every sense, built around endurance, faith, identity, love, and the stubborn will to keep moving when history tries to crush ordinary people.
Author Greg Price doesn’t write with a lot of polish for polish’s sake. He writes to tell the story clearly, and that plainness actually gives many scenes more force. When Leo’s family is broken apart, or when people are pushed from homes and into rail cars, the book does not feel interested in cleverness. It wants the pain to land cleanly. At times, the dialogue has a straightforward quality, and the novel leans into earnestness rather than subtlety, which gives it a sincerity that feels true to its character.
This is not just a Holocaust novel. It grows into a sweeping historical saga with romance, faith, Zionism, displacement, medicine, and even heart transplant research in the later sections. That reach is ambitious. As if several novels have been stitched into one long one. But there is something moving about that ambition, too. Price seems determined to show that survival is not the end of a story. Life keeps unfolding. People love, work, argue, build families, chase callings, and carry old grief into new countries. That idea felt authentic to me. Trauma is not wrapped up neatly here. It echoes. It travels. It changes shape.
In its sweeping historical reach and focus on ordinary lives shaped by war, IYSH may remind readers of The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah. But where Hannah’s novel is more polished and lyrical, Greg Price’s book feels more direct and openly earnest, with the pull of a family saga told from the heart.
I came away from IYSH feeling that it is more about witness, memory, and moral conviction. I would recommend it most to readers who appreciate historical fiction with a strong emotional core, especially those who do not mind a long, wide-ranging narrative that blends wartime suffering with romance, family resilience, and medical drama. Readers who want a heartfelt, old-fashioned historical novel that wears its sincerity in full view will find a lot to value here.
Pages: 1025 | ASIN : B0F5ZCFHC5
A Love Letter
Ancilla centers around a bisexual woman in the 80s and 90s in Ohio as she finds herself unraveling her own Catholic upbringing when she enters into a relationship with a magus who becomes her mentor, dom, and soulmate. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I took my inspiration from a number of different sources.
Some of it came from my own memories of growing up. I, too, was raised in Ohio, at roughly the same time my protagonist grew up. People have asked me just how autobiographical the book is, to which I would have to say, not much, except for the protagonist’s sexual orientation (I, too, am bi/pan and kinked – more on this later) and the book’s setting.
Putting the story in the time I remembered, in places where I had lived, allowed me to do my background descriptions more or less on autopilot so that I could focus on other things. I didn’t want to think too hard about whether or not I was describing a college campus, or downtown library, or city park accurately. It felt like a distraction. I wanted to use familiar material when writing. I prefer to pour my energy into other things: word choice, sentence structure, philosophy, foreshadowing, character development, and style.
Some of it came from a desire to fill a void – to fill multiple voids, actually. Bisexual people, for instance, are rare in literature. They’re rare in general. When we are portrayed, it’s usually in a villainous context (we’re depraved! Remember Basic Instinct?) or a pitiable one (just Google “hot mess bisexual” and “disaster bisexual” and see what you get – it’s an unfortunate trope). When we manage to be the main characters rather than just side characters, we’re still usually villains or “messy.” Or we’re hypersexualized! The bisexual literature category, commercially, is well-stocked with smut. This is not necessarily a bad thing if you are looking for validation or for one-handed reading material, but I think we deserve something serious, as well.
So I wrote something that was sort of like The Bell Jar, only its protagonist is a young bisexual woman. (Also, it takes the historical figures of Heloise and Abelard as its inspiration, and the main characters are vampires who can bend elements when adequately fed or otherwise sufficiently powered, because magical realism. I assume my readers are bright enough to figure that one out for themselves).
I worked in depictions of BDSM that centered informed, enthusiastic consent, because there’s a lot of material out there that romanticizes captivity, “dubious consent” with or without “betraying body syndrome” (news flash: “blurred lines” are just rape), and other abusive dynamics, and that’s not what BDSM is all about. Let’s have some good representation.
And I created characters who were different from what might be otherwise expected in more mainstream love stories. How often have you encountered a story about a couple of academic nerd types falling head over heels in love with each other, despite what was originally meant to be a purely tutorial relationship? And how often have those nerds been obviously neurodivergent? Although I don’t say so explicitly (there’s not a lot I say explicitly in Ancilla, ironically enough for a novel that is explicit enough when it comes to matters of sexuality) I coded “ancilla” and “Magister” as autistic. I am on the spectrum, so this is another way in which Ancilla is own-voice literature written for a demographic that, at least from what I have seen, seldom gets good representation. The autistic characters I’ve seen in books are often caricatures, or at least, our autism is treated as our entire personality, rather than as just part of what makes us who we are and ought to be taken for granted as such. Normalized.
I especially thought about breaking convention when crafting “Magister,” because I wanted to create a male character who didn’t fit at all into the “man box,” but who was nevertheless unquestionably masculine. Whereas most men in romance novels are alphas, even when they aren’t alphaholes, “Magister” is shy and reserved, and he is more than content to let other people take the lead when BDSM is not involved. He’s not a billionaire CEO or sports figure or firefighter or cowboy or spy or in some other hyper-masculinized, unrealistically romanticized line of work – he’s a librarian. He’s middle class, and that only barely. Hobbies? He cooks and bakes, listens to opera, reads, and plays tabletop role-playing games. Is he “ripped?” No, he’s actually rather slender, and his muscles are not prominent (although he is strong enough to carry “ancilla” in his arms without struggling – let the readers assume what they like about whether or not vampiric power factored into that one). He’s comfortable with showing his feelings and being vulnerable, too, although introvert that he is, he’s usually rather subtle about it… He is masculine, though. Very obviously. You wouldn’t have accused people like Bob Ross and Fred Rogers of not being men just because they didn’t fit into the prescribed masculine mold when they were alive, and I don’t think anybody could accuse “Magister” of not being a man, either. He is a wrecking ball to toxic masculinity.
I put these people into a setting I knew, and knew intimately, so that I could focus on them rather than on the setting. I wanted them to shine.
On another level, Ancilla is a love letter. The people I wrote it for know who they are. They might not see themselves in the characters – in fact, I sincerely hope they don’t, because my characters are distinct people in their own right, and were never meant to be based closely on anybody in particular, even in instances where I ransacked my memories, took things out of context that I thought would read well if fictionalized, and embroidered like mad – but they know who they are.
One of them was my first beta reader. She lost internet access soon after I completed the rough draft and sent her the final chapter in its raw form, and I hope she finds the final product on Amazon or in a library somewhere, reads it, and approves of it. And if she ever sees this interview, I hope she reads far enough to see that I say I miss her.
What drew you to frame your narrative in this particular setting?
Why northeast Ohio in the early 1990s, of all times?
Partly because, again, I wanted to rely on memory for descriptions of the setting. Nearly all the places described in the book are real, whether I’m describing a mansion in Cincinnati within walking distance of a posh private school, a small college on the edge of northeast Ohio’s Amish country, Severance Hall, or the neighborhoods and metroparks of Akron and Cleveland. The only made-up place in the entire book is “Magister’s” apartment, which I nevertheless set at the end of a real street. I didn’t want to interrupt my creative processes by researching locales. I just wanted to write my story and let the setting more or less take care of itself. I trusted my memory when thinking about how to describe places.
I also decided on northeast Ohio because it was generic. A colourful setting – say, Manhattan – would have become almost a character in itself. I wanted a setting that felt real, but not one that would steal the focus from my characters and from the book’s esoteric themes.
If I’d set the story too early, it would have been historical fiction, which would have required extra research. If I’d set it later, it would eventually become science fiction, because this is going to be part of a trilogy, and the third book covers “ancilla’s” later years. She’s writing her memoirs, and at the time of her writing, she’s either a centenarian or a late nonagenarian. That’s still going to put the final chapters of the last book in the future, but not very far. I don’t want the focus to pivot to science fiction scenarios… So the time is set where it is.
The eighties and nineties were not a good time to be queer in any way, unless you were maybe living in a haven like San Francisco. While I didn’t want to make that hostility to sexual divergence the most central part of the plot, it is nevertheless part of the background. It was all too common for kids to get disowned by their parents after coming out, or to be packed off to “deprogramming.” Coming out was terrifying if you lived in a conservative part of the country, which was most of the country at the time.
It was also difficult to be kinked back then. There wasn’t much support for it unless, again, you had the good fortune to live in a large city where there was an active subculture. Today, “ancilla” and “Magister” could have booked sessions with a kink-friendly, polyamory-friendly couples counselor to work on the challenges they faced (okay, that I set up for them). That option did not exist for them in their time and place.
The chapters are structured around the Tree of Life and its sephiroth, turning the novel into a kind of spiritual ladder. Why did you decide to organize the book this way?
It came to me.
It demanded to be written that way.
I still don’t know if I was up to the task that seemed to have been set before me. Only time will tell.
What do you hope readers ultimately take away from your protagonist’s journey through belief, identity, and desire?
Enlightenment.
Failing that, I hope I created something so beautiful that it felt like a dream, and so immersive that it felt like a pleasant form of drowning.
And for the readers on the margins of our heteronormative, neurotypical society, I hope they see themselves represented and know that they are not alone, and that they are valid.
We exist. We have a right to exist. We have a right to be visible.
Author Links: Reedsy Discovery | BookBub | GoodReads | Bluesky | Facebook | Instagram | Pinterest | YouTube | Website | Amazon
Avenue for an Assassin
Avenue for an Assassin is a political thriller set in the tense years after World War II. It follows Jonas Shaw, an ex-detective and former protector of Winston Churchill, as he is pulled into a shadowy plot that begins with a mysterious shooting on a rural French road. From that moment, the story widens into a web of money couriers, Soviet operatives, Resistance veterans, and a looming operation that threatens to destabilize nations. The book blends espionage, murder, and international maneuvering, and it moves with all the confidence of a classic suspense novel.
Author Steve Haberman writes with a steady hand. His pacing is unhurried in a way that works well because the world he builds is thick with history and personal ghosts. Jonas, especially, carries that weight. I found myself liking him for his rough honesty and the way he constantly wrestles with past mistakes. Sometimes the plot dips into long explanations, but I didn’t mind because it is intriguing and immersive from the first few chapters.
What struck me most was the author’s choice to weave major historical power players into a thriller that still feels intimate. The Soviet angle, the old Resistance networks, the sense that Europe is still picking up its broken pieces, these textures give the book more depth than I first expected. Natasha, the operative driven by the shadow of her father, is unsettling and fascinating all at once. Haberman doesn’t romanticize espionage; he shows it as shabby apartments, bad meals, coded newspaper ads, and people who are just trying to survive the next move on a dangerous chessboard. Sometimes the scenes feel almost cinematic; other times they feel like the quiet hum of a city at midnight, when the wrong knock on the door can derail everything.
By the end, I felt Avenue for an Assassin more than delivered everything a good thriller should: tension, atmosphere, flawed people trying their best, and a mystery that slowly sharpens into something frighteningly believable. If you enjoy historical thrillers, Cold War setups, or stories where everyday streets hide dangerous secrets, this one will be right up your alley. It’s a great pick for readers who like their suspense grounded and their characters complicated, and who don’t mind taking the long way around as the story unfolds.
Pages: 221 | ASIN : B0GF9C3454
