Flares

Book 1: The Grimwood Trilogy

by Mike Attebery

Genres: Coming of Age; Friendship

Synopsis

Six college friends are finding their way, falling in love, and preparing for their futures in a place where the past is ever present.

Grimwood University is renowned for its legendary namesake, and infamous for a long-ago tragedy that has largely faded from memory. But if Grimwood’s darkest chapter has been forgotten, its echoes remain, mirroring the experiences of subsequent generations, and flaring up in their lives in surprising and unexpected ways.

College freshman Loren Austin has traveled across the country in search of independence and a new beginning. Braden McNutt is also hoping for a fresh start as he embarks upon his college career. They’ve both come to Grimwood to study in the school’s celebrated writing program – founded by the gifted if doomed author Alan Grimwood - where they quickly forge a close but complicated connection. Joined by roommates Brooke Winston and Hank Pierce, and classmates Hannah Merritt and Jason Pepper, they form a bonded circle that will transform each of them over the course of a life-changing year.

Flares welcomes readers to the college experience of their dreams, and introduces them to the complex, funny, impulsive, and unforgettable group of friends they’ll be following throughout the course of The Grimwood Trilogy.

Release date: November 16, 2021

Publisher: Cryptic Bindings

Print pages: 296

Sample

Grimwood

Grimwood University had two claims to fame. One was a man. The other, an event. And while the man, author and professor Alan Grimwood, wouldn’t live to see the benefits of his own notoriety, he did bear witness to the tragedy that would forever sear his family’s name, and the college they founded, into the minds of Americans everywhere.

One year after the Attica Prison riot forever connected the name of that infamous correctional facility with the community in which it was located, the town of Grimwood, which for more than a century had enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the institution Ashton Grimwood established on the hill, quite suddenly found itself at the center of its own ghoulish media storm. While the town would eventually regain a sense of balance and normalcy, the college and its most famous professor would be forever linked with the events that took place a week before Thanksgiving in 1972.

If there was one element of justice in the incident on Grimwood campus, it was the fact that the armed, deeply-disturbed young man who stormed the University’s library and took the object of his “affection” hostage – along with eleven other students – never gained the posthumous notoriety so often bequeathed by today’s media. Indeed, after he murdered all twelve of his victims, and jumped to his death from the library’s tower, his name was almost immediately forgotten to time. To the townspeople, the students of Grimwood University, and anyone jolted by reports of one of America’s earliest college shootings, its perpetrator would forever be known as The Shooter.

Then there was Ashton Grimwood’s great-grandson, Alan, who, after founding a uniquely intensive writing program at the school, was initially most recognized for his teaching, and less so for his writing. But that would eventually change. In 1955, the publication of Alan Grimwood’s Revenant had gone all but unnoticed. Two years after the tragedy, and nineteen years after the publication of his first novel, Black Robes hit shelves and was met with moderate success, owing largely to the dark subject matter and media interest fueled by the infamous campus killings. In the years that followed, rumors swirled of a third completed manuscript, which Grimwood was said to have thrown over The Falls to the east of the University’s campus, but other than the accounts of a handful of long-departed alums, the event was never corroborated. It wasn’t until Grimwood’s untimely death four years later, at the unjust age of 57, that something interesting happened. It began with people digging up copies of Revenant in used bookstores. Something about that book’s subject matter – which touched upon life and death, fate, and the afterlife – struck a nerve with readers, who passed their copies along to their friends before hunting down Black Robes and repeating the process. By 1981, both books were back in print. In 1983, excerpts of a fourth book, Doppelganger – an unfinished sequel to Revenant, which Grimwood was writing when he dropped dead of a massive heart attack – were released by his publisher. The Collected Stories of Alan Grimwood (1950 – 1978) followed a year later, and from thereon out, Alan Grimwood became a legend of genre fiction, one with a small but endlessly fascinated base of readers. Grimwood was unmarried at the time of his death. With no children, and no heirs, the rights to his books were passed to The Writing Center at the University, which knew a good thing when it saw it, and made sure his work remained in print, occasionally releasing revised and expanded commemorative editions in order to maintain the copyrights.

What then of the institution bearing the Grimwood family name? A decade after Alan’s death, Grimwood University was comfortably ensconced amongst its old-school, upstate brethren. The Writing Center flourished. Twenty years on, ghoulish curiosity had faded, but from time to time, visitors to the campus reported unusual experiences that made their blood run cold. There were even those who claimed to have seen Alan Grimwood himself, strolling the grounds near the place of his death. To an outsider, such stories might have seemed laughable, but it was interesting to note that few people in town, and almost no one on campus, ever called such reports into question.

Chapter 1

"I don’t want to write about sinister things.”

“How do you mean?” Loren asked. “You don’t want to tell dark stories, or you don’t want to write about the bad things that can happen in life?”

“I guess both... People are here, and then they’re gone. We can vanish in the blink of an eye and never see it coming. If you think about that too long, you start to wonder why people bother getting up in the morning, why anyone pursues their dreams at all. Why create stories that emphasize how weak the threads holding all of this together really are?”

“Maybe to remind people that time is precious. Other than your life, what do you really have to lose? Dark stories can be cathartic.”

“So, is that the kind of thing you want to say?” Braden asked as he held her gaze.

“To be honest, I’m not sure what it is that I want to say.” She could feel her face growing warm. “I guess that’s why I’m here, to figure that out.”