Novels

The Human Family: Book One of the American Inferno Series

The Human Family is a historical family saga about enslavers and their enslaved children. Set in antebellum Virginia, this multi-POV novel delves into the mindsets of enslaved people, slaveholders, and abolitionists, exploring how oppressive systems damage the human potential of the oppressed and their oppressors alike.

When Lucille learns that her father and enslaver Joseph will soon be legally compelled to sell her to pay his debts, she must find a way to escape, or risk being sold into a life of even greater exploitation. Meanwhile Joseph, who struggles with and cannot fully acknowledge his love for Lucille, is faced with the choice of whether to free his daughter to protect her, even though it goes against everything he believes about the rightness of slavery. 

As death looms from a yellow fever epidemic, Lucille and Joseph’s lives become interwoven through a chain of credit, sales, and promises with the lives of other inhabitants of the same Virginia town: the ruthless, profit-seeking planter Thomas, his conflicted heir Adam, and his discontented enslaved son Gabriel; and the town’s new preacher Robert, secretly an abolitionist.

The Human Family is the first book of an epic series involving family drama, forbidden love, and resistance to slavery against the backdrop of antebellum Virginia, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.

Short Fiction

Maximum Entropy

A German chemist flees from potential arrest in the early years of the Nazi regime. As he travels by train to escape Gestapo agents, he reflects on the nature of time and his wife's death by suicide twenty years before.

A Pilgrimage of Ghosts

A young man seeks the truth of what happened to his sister after she disappears while trying to reach the United States from Guatemala. Meanwhile his sister, narrating from the afterlife, seeks to find her way back to the world of the living.

Victims and Executioners

After escaping from imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp, Paul, a young physicist with Communist sympathies, seeks to wield his scientific knowledge to defeat the Nazi regime. But as he becomes involved in research for an atomic bomb, he has to confront the possibility of creating a weapon that goes against everything he believes.