In the Shade of a Lightning Rod
by John Satriano
Paperback: $15
It’s the spring of 1970. Bobby Rand is a nine-year-old boy, growing up in Roseland, on Chicago’s south side. One of his third-grade classmates has lost his mother and lives alone with his twenty-year-old sister, toward whom he bears a pathological hatred: he lures Bobby into a plot to murder her. What happens as a result causes Bobby to suffer a nervous breakdown, and leads to his confinement in a mental hospital. He recovers, but things will never be the same again. He leaves Roseland with his family for another Chicago neighborhood, Marquette Park. In high school, he is an honour student, a star baseball player, and a serious abuser of drugs. The past continues to haunt his life into adulthood. He marries and has two children, and seems to have found redemption. But the past is implacable. In the autumn of 1999, on the eve of the new millennium, he discovers that he is still unable to escape it.