What if survival required you to unlearn who you are? How far would you fall to save yourself? Sometimes happiness is a long way down. The Johns family is unraveling. Hollis, a retired Ohio banker, isolates himself in esoteric hobbies and a dangerous flirtation with a colleague’s daughter. Susan, his wife of forty years, risks everything for a second chance at who she might have become. David, their eldest, thrashes to stay afloat as his teaching career capsizes in a storm of accusations involving a missing student and the legacy of Christopher Columbus. And young Tilly, the black sheep, having traded literary promise for an improbable career as a Hollywood starlet, struggles to define herself amid salacious scandal, the demands of a powerful director, and the judgments of an uncompromising writer. By turns comical and poignant, the Johns family is tumbling toward the discovery that sometimes you have to let go of your identity to find out who you are. [A] cerebral page turner…a powerful and promising debut.—Kirkus Reviews [Five Stars]…[A] powerful, gripping and realistic story…The Lion Trees does what so very few great novels can: it will take a lot out of you, but leave you with much more than you had when you began —Pacific Book Reviews, a five star review.

The Lion Trees: Part One: Unraveling

Literature & Fiction

THOMAS, Owen

Literary

OTF Literary

The Lion Trees: Part I: Unraveling

This is the Dream, ten stories less about dreaming than not dreaming. Ten stories about pulling free the gossamer mask of illusion and seeing the face of what has been true – about ourselves, about the people we choose to love, and about our path through the woods – from the very beginning. 
JOHN. The bus driver whose lunchtime encounter with Andromeda reunites him with the one person he has spent a lifetime choosing to avoid. (“Everything Stops”). 
WYATT. The Appalachian who wakes from a dream that his wife has been abducted by aliens to find that she has gone missing and wishing the explanation could be so benign. (“Little Green Men”). 
RUTH. The chocolate-quality inspector whose compartmentalized solitude threatens complete suffocation until a renowned romance novelist reveals the paper-thin wall that separates despair and hope. (“Paper Walls”). 
KATHY. The identical twin, so desperate to be original that she sacrifices her authenticity to a stranger on a plane, lying herself a new identity without any thought to the consequences. (“Failure to Thrive – Act One: Flying and Lying”). 
KATJA and JUNE. The novelist and the reporter, bound by history, separated by an ocean, and united in a struggle to reconcile their own hearts one letter at a time. (“Failure to Thrive – Act Two: Katja and June”). 
K.P. SORENSON. The convention speaker with a renewed hope of becoming a literary demiurge, looking for validation from an audience of would-be fans, but finding instead the very last man she expects and the only woman who can separate fact from fiction. (“Failure to Thrive – Act Three: The Birds”). 
DANNY. The laid-off, newly separated factory worker whose life is in such dramatic contrast to that of his next-door neighbor, and George Clooney, that robbing a convenience store seems like his best option. (“Hating George Clooney”). 
PETER. The teenager who, forced to spend Christmas in Hawaii with his younger sister, his parents, and the friends of his father not seen since college, discovers that reality is only a state of mind. (“Island Santa”). 
ZOE. The Hollywood intern, working on a movie about a superhero with random powers, managing a telephone relationship with an anonymous criminal, and excavating the secret structure of creation. (“Random Man”). 
CALI. The high school loner whose dreams of a dead classmate lead her to the razor’s edge between living and not living. (“This is the Dream”).

This is the Dream

Short Stories & Anthologies

Raymond Mackey is a struggling crime writer. His friends call him Mack. But friends are in short supply. Mack's thirty years as a homicide detective came to the kind of abrupt, ignominious end that tends to make friends dry up and blow away. It matters little that Mack was never actually a mole working for a shadowy, omnipresent mob boss. Somehow, the evidence was there anyway. Lucky to stay out of prison, Mack lives in a netherworld of forced retirement, spinning his memories of old homicide cases into pulp fiction and working part time as a shopping mall cop. His wife Marlo, the greatest investigator Mack has ever known, has been dead of pancreatic cancer for five years. That leaves his ancient Smith-Corona Corsair, a pack of Camels, a bottle of Old Forester, and Marlo's bourbon-loving cat, Phil, as Mack's only company. Almost. Because Mack also keeps himself company. The psychiatrists call it Depersonalization-Derealization Disorder. Mack calls it Triple-D. But crazy also works. It means he watches himself, usually from an overhead perspective, as though someone has tied a floating camera to a back beltloop on a long string. It makes him feel watched, and not by someone inclined to judge him kindly. So Raymond Mackey comes complete with his own Greek chorus. "Watch yourself, Mack," people tell him. He has no choice.When one of Mack's old informants goes missing and Mack's face turns up in a dead man's camera, his past comes roaring painfully back to life. Now the police want him for questioning, the mob want him dead and it's increasingly difficult to tell who, exactly, is working for who. As a mercilessly hot Chicago summer finally breaks and it starts to rain bodies, Mack finds himself past his prime for this kind of action. Retirement has added weight and subtracted agility. He hasn't fired a weapon in years. His antiquated cell phone will not stop ringing with a mysteriously blocked number. In the end, as Mack watches himself from above, it is razor-sharp instinct, cheap consumer electronics and his dead wife that offer his only hope.

Message in a Bullet: A Raymond Mackey Mystery - Book 1 (Raymond Mackey Mysteries)

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mystery

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the OTF Literary publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by OTF Literary