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This is not a guide for aspiring vigilantes, but it might inspire you!
Welcome to Poeticule Bay, Maine, a village where justice is scarce, and secrets have deadly consequences. When a gay student is brutally attacked and exiled from his home, the police turn a blind eye. Fueled by rage, Molly Jergins launches a relentless campaign against the school bully and his sinister family.
As Molly’s quest for retaliation spirals into chaos, the lines between hero and villain blur. To hunt monsters, must she become the very thing she despises? In the end, will revenge prove the best success?
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With the state of the world, something else feels more raw and human than ever: our righteous outrage. VIH touches that nerve in happy ways.
It’s been a long time and a long journey since my last novel.
When I published Endemic, Amazon squelched the launch of the novel. I couldn’t promote it, and Amazon could not be reasoned with. I suspect the title alone got it pushed down in the algorithms. Though sabotaged from the start, eventually Endemic got out there.
Then this happened:
Endemic won multiple awards. That made me feel a bit better.
The Amazon experience left a sour taste in my mouth, though. I love that novel and hated to see it sabotaged. It’s an apocalyptic tale with a fascinating character. It’s also about how people change, and how they don’t. Great stuff, but the launch to readers was strangled in the crib.
Then came the tribulations:
Pain, pain, two hip replacements, pain, and a long recovery.
For six weeks after each surgery, I was prohibited from even crossing my legs or bending over. I had to relearn how to walk and rebuild my broken neural connections. My wife laughed and cried as she struggled to get my compression stockings on me. (If you know, you know the struggle.)
Stuck in bed and working on rehab, I binge watched Justified. I loved that fun distraction, but I was also ingesting the rhythms of interesting dialogue.
That show was set in Kentucky, and VIH is set in Maine. Very different, of course, but I started to hear how my characters might express themselves uniquely. So much of this book draws on my childhood in rural Nova Scotia. There, I felt there was a threat of violence much of the time.
I began to pull from my dad’s litany of odd expressions, too:
- “That boy’s got the world by the ass on a downhill drag.” (Good fortune.)
- “That smell would drive a dog off a gut wagon.” (Bad odor.)
- “You’re young and fulla blue piss…” (A prelude to telling someone to do a chore.)
Characters arose from people I knew. I had material from real life, so I kept pecking away at this big story about a heroine versus a school bully in Poeticule Bay, Maine. (Fans of This Plague of Days will recognize that name.)
My protagonist from VIH, Molly Jergins, began to speak to me.
I resonated with Ovid Fairweather, the protagonist from Endemic. We share some of the same sensitivities. Molly spoke to me in a more visceral way. She was sick to death of bad people getting away with doing bad things. She’s not above good people doing bad things to bad people. We both fantasized about vengeance and the many clever ways we might achieve righteous vengeance. (I think about revenge. A lot. Don’t you? Is it just me? Nah.…)
That’s how Vengeance Is Hers grew.
I wrote and rewrote more as my recovery progressed. I just had eye surgery last week, and I’m happy to say that, as a cyborg, I’m much better than I was. Ironically, with more artificial parts, I feel human again. With the state of the world, something else feels more raw and human than ever: our righteous outrage. VIH touches that nerve in happy ways.
Vengeance Is Hers is not an instruction book for vigilantes, but it will give you vicarious thrills. It will make you giggle at the revenge, big and small, you could visit upon those who have wronged you.
But the feelings go deeper than that.
Beyond the action, Vengeance Is Hers is a story of the bond between a father and a daughter. Dark family secrets and deeply held resentments rise to the surface. The psychological effects of bullying and abuse delve into the mindsets of both the bullied and the abused. The twists, reversals, and betrayals will keep you guessing to the last page.
Vengeance Is Hers is a big book, too!
Molly’s self-destructive addiction to righting wrongs unfolds over a twelve-year span. It’s 448 pages of beach read that will keep you turning pages to discover the fate of characters you’ll grow to love, hate, and laugh about.
This was so much fun to write. With Vengeance Is Hers, I put a movie in your head that I hope you’ll want to read again and again. Enjoy, and thank you for being a reader!
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