There is nothing extraordinary about Chris Rowan. Each day he wakes to the same faces, has the same breakfast, the same commute, the same sort of homes he tries to rent out to unsuspecting tenants.
There is nothing extraordinary about Chris Rowan. That is apart from the black dog that haunts his nightmares and an unexpected encounter with a long forgotten demon from his past. A nudge that will send Chris on his own downward spiral, from which there may be no escape.
There is nothing extraordinary about Chris Rowan...
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The idea for this book began as an almost documentary style project, charting how easily someone can go, in a distressingly short time, from leading a normal family life to being on the streets. As so often happens, the characters rose up and grabbed the author by the throat, demanding to be heard. As a result, this is the story of a man, no stupider or more thoughtless than anyone else you might meet, whose struggle with depression and the denial which is so often its travelling companion, begins on a downward spiral, taking out so many others in his wake. The story is also told from their perspective; no one is just a bystander in someone else’s life, we all have stories which need telling.
No fall from grace happens to just one person; when the author was writing this, the term heard so often by any CSI fan was always in mind; ‘High velocity spatter’. There is no blood and gore in this book, but the high velocity spatter of a life suddenly in ruins touches everyone and no one is ever the same again.
The other theme in the story is that no one we meet can ever be quite all they seem. No one goes to work, to a party, out shopping wearing a badge saying, ‘Hi! I am an amoral sociopath – approach at your own risk’. It might be said that things would be easier if this indeed were the case but looked at from the other end of the spectrum, fiction would be a poorer place were it so.
Not everyone crashes and burns along with our protagonist, Chris, a lettings agent with a partner and young child. Some are collateral damage and boy, do they deserve it. Some are hurt but can limp away, to carry on lives which are not worse, just different. Others gain knowledge, perspective and another layer of skin, making them more fit for the rest of their lives.
Through the whole tale, the soundtrack of Chris’s life plays out, sometimes black, other times blacker still. Chapter titles are taken from appropriate songs which will surely be stuck in his head sometimes as his life unravels and an unusual feature of this book is a list of links to performances of the songs in question – play them with the chapter or afterwards, the choice is the reader’s but it gives another dimension to what goes on in Chris’s head as he and his black dog crash on to disaster.
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