The Memory Closet: A Novel (32 page)
Read The Memory Closet: A Novel Online
Authors: Ninie Hammon
talks briefly about BLACK SUNSHINE
After two decades of shame that drove him into a whiskey bottle and left him a homeless, under-a-bridge drunk, Will Gribbins has come home to face his past.
He and his best friend were the only two survivors of the 1980 explosion that killed 27 Eastern Kentucky miners in the Harlan #7 Coal Mine and shattered countless other lives in the close-knit little community of Aintree Hollow. But the two young men escaped the mine that day with more than just their lives. Each carried the burden of a terrible secret about another tragedy that occurred in the mine after the explosion, a secret that destroys the next two decades of Will’s life.
He returns to the hollow for the first time in 20 years for the memorial service on the anniversary of the disaster, but Will doesn’t know his arrival has set in motion a chain of events that will threaten the lives of another crew of miners digging coal in a mile-deep hole under Black Mountain.
As he reconnects with Aintree Hollow, with Granny Sparrow, whose grief has imprisoned her, JoJo, who carries a terrible secret of her own and Jamey, a mentally handicapped boy who carves magical coal statutes, Will doesn’t see the mounting danger. Or that the boy holds the key to it all.
When the fate of innocent miners is again placed in Will’s hands, can he summon the courage he lacked two decades ago? Is he man enough to save them, even if it means he must do the one thing he fears most?
(Click the links below to:)
to get free books, special offers, "insider" info on upcoming books.
talks briefly about FIVE DAYS IN MAY.
On a warm May Friday in 1963, a mammoth tornado hurls across the empty plains toward the little town of Graham, Oklahoma. The writhing column of destruction a mile wide and eight miles high is not just on a collision course with the town, but with the lives of four of its residents; each of whom has already planned their own personal rendezvous with death that day.
Jonas Cunningham has reached the end of his rope, now he lives only to free his precious Maggie from the fog of Alzheimer’s. His 16-year-old granddaughter, Joy, is desperate, too. She’s pregnant. And scared. And sees only one way out. Joy’s father, Reverend Mac MacIntosh has lost his wife and his faith and on Friday plans to “kill” his ministry.
But as Mac meets daily with a strange, mystical death row inmate during the final five days of her life, everything begins to change. Set to be executed at five o’clock that Friday, Princess knows things she can’t possibly know about Mac’s life and sees things she can’t possibly see. And she is determined to carry to her grave an incredible secret about the little sister she confessed to beheading 14 years ago.
When the monster twister bears down on them, all four of the people who’d penciled in “death” on their calendars for that day in May actually do make eye contact with dying. But they don’t come to the crossroads of life and death by the path they’d planned and they don’t leave with the result they expected. And they don’t all survive.
(Click the links below to:)
to get free books, special offers, "insider" info on upcoming books.
talks briefly about HOME GROWN.
Somebody shot Jim Bingham, shot him dead on the street in front of his own newspaper office, and now his heartbroken daughter must abandon the world of academic journalism for the real world of running the newspaper he left behind.
But Sarabeth Bingham soon discovers that marijuana-growing has corrupted the idyllic little central Kentucky community where she grew up. The sheriff can’t get a marijuana conviction because the county’s jury pool is tainted. Her cousin grows weed and has lost his wife and daughter to the world of drugs. After three children find dope money in an abandoned building and the dopers kidnap them to get it back, Sarabeth heeds the words on the plaque that has always hung above her father’s desk: “Don’t mess with a man who buys ink by the barrel!”
In the next issue of the newspaper, Sarabeth declares war on dope in a blazing front-page editorial! Now, the growers have to shut Sarabeth up. And dopers fight dirty.
(Click the links below to:)
to get free books, special offers, "insider" info on upcoming books.
talks briefly about
THE LAST SAFE PLACE.
In the deepest, darkest midnight of her soul, Gabriella writes a horror story about demons, and then one of them crawls up out of the pages and confronts her face to face. A deranged, fanatical fan who believes he is The Beast of Babylon from her novel turns up at a book signing and then comes after her to claim her as his bride. And to sacrifice her son, Ty, as an blood offering to their unholy union.
Gabriella, Ty and Ty’s grandfather, Theo, the crusty old stand-up comic called Slap Yo Mama Carmichael, run for their lives, back to the only place in Gabriella’s life where she ever felt safe. But once there, she discovers that facing the demons from her past may be harder and more dangerous than facing the one who hunts her.
As Ty and Theo battle their own, personal monsters, Gabriella begins to fall for a man who carries a guilt she can’t even begin to imagine.
The predator who stalks Gabriella and her family tracks them down and corners his prey as a full moon rides high in the night sky and lightning explodes on the mountaintop. Then all their lives and demons collide in a final, apocalyptic celebration of one man’s madness. Gabriella’s only hope lies in the unexplainable power of 2,000-year-old tree. Is it strong enough to save them? Can a single, perfect bristlecone pine somehow determine the fate of them all?
(Click the links below to:)
to get free books, special offers, "insider" info on upcoming books.
talks briefly about SUDAN.
Sudan 2000.
Hiding in the chaos of a civil war, the Arab government of the largest nation in Africa has practiced a ruthless program of systematic genocide and more than two million southern Sudanese tribal people have been massacred. But American human rights journalist Ron Wolfson isn’t in Sudan to cover the war. He’s risking his life there to chase a different story—reports of a massive government-assisted slave trade.
When Arab Murahaleen guerrillas attack a small village and kidnap a little girl named Akin to sell on the slave market in the North, her father, Idris, goes after her and Ron joins the simple villager in his desperate effort to rescue his child. While Ron’s brother, a U.S. congressman, battles indifference to force international political pressure on the Sudanese government, Ron finds the story he’s been looking for and suffers the brutal retaliation of a slave trader.
On the eve of the sanctions vote in the U.S. House of Representatives, the lives of Ron and Idris hang by a thread, their fate in the hands of a bloodthirsty mercenary and an orphan boy. But even if they survive, is it already too late to save little Akin from the brutal horror her master has panned for her?
(Click the links below to:)
to get free books, special offers, "insider" info on upcoming books.
talks briefly about
WHEN BUTTERFLIES CRY.
On August 11, 1969, two anguished voices on opposite sides of the planet cry out in terror at the exact same instant and their desperate pleas release a strange power. That power will change the destiny of a West Virginia family in a strip mined hollow that lies in the shadow of a 300-million-gallon coal slag lake—held in place by a makeshift dam high on the mountainside.
