The Young Fate

A fantastical coming-of-age meets the existential detective novel.

Order the paperback at bookstore.org or at your favorite local bookstore…mine is Malaprops. Also available in paperback and eBook on all major marketplaces.

A young boy grapples with the fact his best friend has vanished from existence while a homeless man stalks and constructs a delusional dime-store fiction around the child.

Yan, a teenager living in Bangkok, wakes to a changed truth—not only has his friend completely disappeared, but an improbable romance entangles him from out of thin air. While Yan contends with and indulges these recent surrealities, Mr. Torpong, a meek meteorologist with a failing grip on reality, gains and loses everything over the course of many years. His and Yan’s strangely echoed lives intersect at the point when the man has almost nothing left to give, and the child stands at the threshold of a world without rules and without meaning.

The Young Fate is an adventure told in a universe where the deadliest fate is to become forgotten, where our debt to an irrational past exceeds any reckoning of our origins, and where anyone can become the impossible hero of somebody else’s story.

Short fiction

While I believe I’ve found my ideal form in the novella, I did get my start with shorter fiction. Here is a recording of one of my favorites: “The Cat, the Rat & the Beetle.”