The Wound of the River

The Wound of the River is a story about obsessive love and obsessive revenge set in the social and racial and political cauldron of the 1960s.

Shann Jordan has come of age within a way of life starting to waver, an almost broken blue-collar Babylon drifting away on the endless river of time. But the factories are still nearby and make new things; the cobblers and tailors and handymen still fix old things; mom and pop groceries dot neighborhood corners while children walk to neighborhood schools and neighborhood theaters; department stores and banks and utilities are locally owned; most men work away from home while most women work away at home.

Shann falls in love with Natalie Ashford, but he is haunted by a terrible secret from his early youth. He is driven to succeed to revenge the death of his father, even at the cost of surrendering almost everything else, even at the cost of the community. Natalie is a young woman with the great power of exquisite beauty. But she is a lost beauty, tormented by her own terrible secret from the past.

The couple is held together over the years by a mutual obsession that keeps and imprisons each of them in their own way, as both of those secrets take their toll before being eventually told.

-- Howard O. Fischer