Kin to Star Dust

A novel in progress

Kin to
Star Dust

A world growing wild.
A man returning to Green Bank.
Something still worth keeping.

Read an excerpt Discover the story
Memory · Companionship · InheritanceIn the quiet of the Appalachian hills

The story

The world goes on.
What do we
leave behind?

Ten years after the collapse, Eli returns to Green Bank with his dog, Bruno, to restore an intelligence that might one day carry humanity’s memory.

He returns to Green Bank, West Virginia, to restore a broken intelligence inside the research facility where he once worked. He wants to leave behind something that can remember humanity truthfully after he is gone.

Kin to Star Dust is a story of memory, companionship, and inheritance. Of tending what remains. Of what one life might leave in the keeping of another.

A manA dogAn intelligenceA living world
“You went back to what had worked.
You did not go back because you were sure.”

From the opening chapter

From the manuscript

The Last Long Walk

Chapter One · Opening excerpt

Somewhere years ago the man he used to be had vanished the way smoke vanishes, between one breath and the next, without ceremony, without anyone to mark it. What came after just kept walking. It was still walking now through the last of the cold timber toward a gate it had not stood in front of in a very long time.

The river does not mourn the water that has passed through it. He had not read that and adopted it. He had arrived at it alone, ten years of mornings watching the world run without them, and then found that Aurelius had put it in words two thousand years before him. The knowing and the words became the same thing. He carried both.

Continue reading the excerpt

The trail came out of the dark timber and into a long open slope and the light hit him all at once, that full spring morning light that had some warmth in it finally. He stopped without meaning to and just stood in it for a second. Bruno stopped with him. The valley was spread out below, green all the way to the far ridge, and the sky was the kind of blue that only came a few weeks a year. He had not seen a view like this in a while. He had been in the trees for two days.

He stood there and let his eyes adjust to the brightness. The slope ran down to a line of sycamores along the creek bottom, the trunks white in the morning light, and beyond them the valley floor, open pasture gone to meadow, bluestem and broomsedge coming in thick where the cattle used to keep it down. The far ridge was still holding shadow on its upper face. By noon it would be gone. He could see where the road used to cut across the valley floor, the grade of it still visible in the way the brush grew, slightly thinner along that line, the ground still compacted enough to resist. In ten more years you would not see it. In twenty it would be gone the way the fence lines were going, the way everything was going, slowly and without drama and without anyone to mark it.

The air tasted different out of the trees. Warmer, open, cut with something sweet he could not name, the particular smell of a valley in May when everything is flowering at once and the sun is finally enough to pull it out of things. He breathed it in and did not try to do anything with it.

He moved on down the slope.

An excerpt from a working draft. Text may change as the manuscript develops.

Still taking shape

A story in the making.

Kin to Star Dust is a novel in progress.
Publication details will be added here when available.