I Shall Be Gone

Something funny is going on in the mind of Jobeus. He's been lying awake at night having visions. It's been a week since they moved him to the Hawses' foster home way out in the country, and the house is still strange, the old man in the pajamas downstairs is weird. Here the legend of a hero long gone still hangs over the hills. Jobeus is awake in the dark. He can't stop thinking about the Hawses' older daughter. The cat out in the pothole seems to be waiting on him. He's lost everything, and now he's beginning to lose his head too. Something is about to happen. But where it all goes, only the west wind knows.

Something funny is going on in the mind of Jobeus. He's been lying awake at night having visions. It's been a week since they moved him to the Hawses' foster home way out in the country, and the house is still strange, the old man in the pajamas downstairs is weird. Everything is. His old life is lost to him, childhood is ending, and now he's beginning to lose his head too. Or is he only just beginning to discover its power? Here Brackenwoods forest stretches for miles and miles around, and the legend of a hero long gone still hangs over the hills. Jobeus is waking. In the dark it seems as though the great mystery is about to reveal itself. Something is happening to him. He can't stop thinking about the Hawses' older daughter, the cat out in the pothole seems to be waiting on him, there is another world calling to him from somewhere. Who’s to say where his road will lead him, because truth is a pathless wood, and the journey home for Jobeus is about to begin. But the only way out is within.

From the writer that nobody knows comes the epic novel sure to stir the minds of dreamers, pinch the arms of sleepers, and knit the brows of fools.

Several years ago the author quit his job in San Francisco and flew to Lima, Peru on a one-way ticket to nowhere. It was during this time that he holed up in Arequipa and wrote most of what would become his first novel - I Shall Be Gone, a spell invoked from visions of youth in the farther reaches of the Great North Woods. The bulk of his travel writings from South America remain unpublished under the title of The Lunatic Chronicles.