Chad Stephens

The Ritual of the Gathering Dust Chad Stephens

I consider my writing spiritual but psychological. Spiritual in the way that you can sense a bizarre void through out The Ritual, it's in the characters' inability to explain what has happened to them. Psychological because every character presents, like puppets, their own painfully perfect mental struggle which brings about an detrimental awareness to the fact that there is no way out! It should leave the reader questioning what is real and what is not. Who is who and who is not. The title of this novel is, The Ritual of the Gathering Dust. This is a tale of a cynically paranoid eighteen year old trying to learn the secret code of cool as he becomes the apprehensive subject to the social groups he encounters. Elsewhere, a depressed, cultist couple, recovering from loud, traumatic pasts, sit with an incurable boredom at a quiet, kitchen table. And while a mysterious hearse drives around without a clear destination through the murky streets of 'Broken Tongues Village' a determined marathon runner will attempt to go against a dead locked society. I introduce you to a world that craves fun, gets it, and scraps the bottom of the barrel for the last of it.