
I wrote GHOST SHOW between writing SEVEN ANGELS and THAT OCTOBER.
I’ve always described it as “Rich Man, Poor Man,” but there’s no rich men. It’s VERY loosely based on the post-war years, when my mother’s family had moved to Muncie, Indiana (in the novel from Seven Angels, in real life, from Jamestown, Tennessee) to find work and a life.
The characters, several siblings from the Anderson family, work, play and try to survive and find their consciousness raised in the process.
The novel has gangsters, traveling Romani, infidelity, untimely death, lesbian college professors, a Bela Lugosi-type washed-up movie star, a traveling “ghost show,” a haunted theater with a real ghost named Milo and the President of the United States, Harry Truman, who visited Muncie that year as part of his election campaign.
But know this: Truman’s role is the most tearjerking of the entire book.
We’re going to publish it through Constellate Publishing this fall, before Christmas, if we stay on our timeline.
Photo above is by my friend John Disher and it’s a photo of the real Rivoli Theater, taken from just below its dome, in the theater’s final days before demolition in the 1980s.
GHOST SHOW is a big book. If you’re looking for a long and absorbing read, this will be it.
I’ll keep you updated here and on social media.
