What if you had a perfect memory?
But every mundane or terrible thing you’ve seen or done was forever seared in your mind?
Recollection follows Jeremy Peoples, a DC radio talk show host cursed with uncontrollably precise recall. Seven years after violence erupted at his school—now nearly lost to a past that feels more vivid than the present—Jeremy is tormented by his belief that he escaped blame for the slayings. However, during a harrowing broadcast confessional to find forgiveness on the eve of a new millennium…
…a shocking turn of events lures him home to Wisconsin and once again, back into danger.
A gritty psychological thriller, Recollection descends with Jeremy, grasping for redemption, before he succumbs to darkness, addiction, and the cat-and-mouse consequences of betrayal.
Recollection (inspired by John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meaney) is for fans of unputdownable suspense who prefer emotional and spiritual depth in their thrillers—like Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River or This is Where it Ends by Marieke Nijkamp—and anyone who craves Historical Fiction set in the 1990s.
What if you had a perfect memory?
But every mundane or terrible thing you’ve seen or done was forever seared in your mind?
Recollection follows Jeremy Peoples, a DC radio talk show host cursed with uncontrollably precise recall. Seven years after violence erupted at his school—now nearly lost to a past that feels more vivid than the present—Jeremy is tormented by his belief that he escaped blame for the slayings. However, during a harrowing broadcast confessional to find forgiveness on the eve of a new millennium…
…a shocking turn of events lures him home to Wisconsin and once again, back into danger.
A gritty psychological thriller, Recollection descends with Jeremy, grasping for redemption, before he succumbs to darkness, addiction, and the cat-and-mouse consequences of betrayal.
Recollection (inspired by John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meaney) is for fans of unputdownable suspense who prefer emotional and spiritual depth in their thrillers—like Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River or This is Where it Ends by Marieke Nijkamp—and anyone who craves Historical Fiction set in the 1990s.
Recollection
by Jeremiah J. Beck
The first mass shooting at a school in America happened at my high school in 1992. Everyone blames the shooter as the sole monster responsible, but the truth is deeper and darker: the murders are my fault.
Raw guilt eats holes through me but every effort to unburden my soul falls on deaf ears. People around me—a collection of acquaintances and strangers I force into the spaces where friends and family should be—take turns looking solemn, struggling uncomfortably to listen or find the right words. They nod knowingly, disagree gently, and console me out of ignorance.
It’s not your fault, they say. You’re wrong, I say back. I know I’m culpable. I was there. I caused it all.
Drug-induced stupors and drunken blackouts bring momentary relief, but I’m spiraling out of control. It’s a manic cycle. The depression is darker, the descents steeper, the despair deeper, my recovery times are shorter. And everything’s picking up speed. I’m barely functioning.
My therapist strives to convince me that it’s survivor’s guilt, post-traumatic stress, a martyr complex, and any number of other syndromes and illnesses that populate her textbooks and notepads. Dr. Darby Grover is wonderful. She listens carefully, talks patiently, and believes she can heal me. I love her too, but she has so much faith in her education and experience that she believes it’s only a matter of time before I’ll experience relief.
She’s wrong.
I know it’s hopeless; I’m hopeless, a lost cause. I’ve seen too much and done too much that can’t be undone, and I’m too undisciplined to follow a treatment schedule of regimented medicine and ineffective advice. However, she doesn’t patronize me, so I keep most of my appointments because she’s smart and sexy and I have tiny moments of peace after talking with her. It’s not her fault that she can’t help me. I’m hiding secrets and I lie to her face. And the memories won’t stay where they belong.
(blood’s in my mouth and the smell of cordite is in my nose and everything is cold and wet and her dead eyes are pleading for me to help but she’s already gone)
I’m guilty, but no one believes me, and I can’t find forgiveness. My grief is a toxic, boiling cauldron of regret, helplessness, and rejected excuses. I don’t want a pardon. I want to take responsibility. I don’t want a pass. I want to pay the price. I don’t want a coronation. I want condemnation. I want to fix the permanently broken parts. I want the impossible and I’ll try anything. I want the relief that comes to a criminal when he’s finally caught and collapses from exhaustion and sleeps because the chase is over.
I want someone to fucking blame me.
I dream about it. I’ve become myopically obsessed. I can barely think of anything else. I’ve been trying for years to bury images I can’t forget, and shoulder a burden that everyone says isn’t mine to carry.
Nothing I try is working. I can’t keep it up.
My chest constricts with a suffocating heartache when I’m quiet. I hate to be alone and I’m terrified in crowds. I scream into whatever pillow I find in whatever bed I wake up in. I cry while I’m driving. People stare but I stopped caring. My stomach churns. I’m pitted against myself. I’m suicidal and feeble. I’m an addict and a drunk.
And I’m the host of the highest rated nighttime talk show in Washington DC.
I’m sick of living a lifetime of lies. It’s why I set things up the way that I did.
Tonight’s show is a two-hour long Hail Mary.
Because tonight…I’m going to interview Mason Reynolds, the man serving nineteen consecutive life sentences for murdering seven of my classmates and wounding twelve others.
I’ll ask Mason to forgive me—live on my radio show—as a therapeutic stunt I’ve been promoting for weeks. A New Year’s Eve show, from 10 p.m. to midnight, that is supposed to propel me out of the bleakness of my past and into a better future.
Hopefully. Probably not. But hopefully.
In the first hour, with the promise of anonymity and without judgment, I’ll put anyone on air who wants to confess to anything: people who’ve cheated and stolen and lied for years and worse, and need to come clean. No sin is too big or too small. I’m here to listen, and if they hesitate I’ll tug on the threads of their story and pull them toward clemency for the benefit of the show.
And then in the final hour, culminating at midnight, I’ll confess that I’m the secret antagonist in the infamous Sugar River Shooting, and seek absolution from Mason. I perfectly recall each detail leading up to the murders and each second of that fateful day, unfailingly.
(she’s stretching out her hand, begging and pleading and crying, and the confusion and the violence and paralyzing panic is flooding my body with adrenaline and I’m shaking—)
Afterward, no one can argue that I’m a victim, or my memories are confused by trauma and time. It’s all going to be exactly validated because of a gift I was born with, a curse that I can never break.
My memory and my emotions are perfectly and completely autobiographical.
I remember and feel every moment of my life with painful, exacting precision.
Dates, times, events, meals, conversations, anything I’ve seen, said, heard or read, from the mundane to the dramatic, are stored in my mind for easy access or random, anxiety-inducing spontaneously triggered reappearances. I can’t forget anything unless I’m in a stupor or unconscious. When I sleep—which is infrequent and comes in short bursts or extended disappearances—I have recurring nightmares. My dreams are vivid, terrifying, and incapacitating. I wake up disoriented and exhausted.
I talk to myself constantly, narrating the present to minimize confusion with the past.
I’m always reorienting. The past and present are permanently intertwined, the Now with the Then.
I’m lost in it.
Nothing fades. Time moves on and the world moves on, but I do not.
I cannot.
How can I be expected to heal when I can’t forget anything?
Everyone else loses their acute pain, regret, and betrayal to The Great Forget. I don’t.
I’m paralyzed by these unforgotten remnants. Of everything. Of her. Of Sarah.
How can I ever love someone else when I can’t let go and there’s a ghost who doesn’t let go of me? I don’t want to be alone anymore, but I don’t want to share my life with anyone other than her. There are no words to say, no compelling argument to bring her back. I’m smothered by idealized memories and an imagined future that died when she did.
(my face is in her auburn hair and it smells like the purple and white lilacs blooming in her backyard and she laughs and I feel that she loves me—)
Every so often I need to look around, blink, and remember when I am. If I don’t consciously bring myself into the current moment, I disappear into the undertow of memories and madness. Dr. Darby is helping me learn to will myself from Then into Now, to separate reverberating emotions from my current feelings. It’s daunting and exhausting and feels impossible and unsustainable, but it’s all I know. So just like Dr. Darby suggested, I focus on what’s in front of me—the pictures on the wall, taken during my meteoric rise in radio.
Dozens of photos, none of my family. They’re all of me with people more famous than me. I’m shaking hands with politicians, musicians, actors, and comedians. I’m swaggering on stage and in bars and at award shows. I’m behind a microphone, scowling or grinning smugly, from my early days in radio back in Madison, Wisconsin, up through these last several months in Washington, DC on Hot Talk 690 WTMI.
The sign on the door, now closed, simply reads, The People’s Talk Show.
There’s a stack of black-and-white, glossy photos of me dressed how I want the audience to picture me: smirking through beard stubble. My straight black hair isn’t long enough to pull back and falls where it wants to. I slick it back, other than one spear that dangles above my left eye. I’m wearing a white V-neck t-shirt under a black leather blazer, which is what I’m wearing tonight, too. The camera caught the expression I get seconds before I wink, like I’m sharing a secret joke, but I’m exasperated that no one’s figured it out yet. My green eyes are distant. I struggle to make eye contact because I know I’m guilty. The day of the photo shoot, it gave me the appearance of focusing on something off in the distance.
I’ve scribbled my signature across each glossy with a silver Sharpie so it pops. Jeremy Peoples. Big looping J, humps and stabs; big swooping P, loops and a flourish.
Jeremy fucking Peoples. The People’s Talk Show. It’s YOUR show, people. But it’s MY show, too. I’m Jeremy Peoples. My audience calls themselves “The Little People.” We love each other, mostly.
It’s 9:47 p.m. on December 31, 1999. The biggest moment in my professional life is in minutes.
Radio personalities, and me especially, obsess over time. Our lives revolve around it. The clock never rests. Always advancing, never waiting. We’re either ready or we’re crashing and burning, the merciless, uncaring clock ticking away, completely apathetic to the plight of our personal lives. It doesn’t care that I’m strung out and falling apart. Time’s also vicious and slow when I least need it to be. I can’t force it to move faster to escape the crushing embarrassment of public humiliation. Sometimes I get lucky and a segment or a show will come together, with preparation or spontaneously. Those moments are thrilling and rare. The only thing I love about time is that it keeps moving. When mistakes are made, more opportunities to win or lose rush toward me unrelentingly. I control none of it.
The clock’s second hand is deafening, ticking faster that it should, speeding up, getting louder. Am I in an asylum? Have I gone completely insane, finally? Is this really happening or is it a delusion?
Oh my God. I need a drink.
Maybe Dr. Darby is right. She believes the interview is the worst decision I could make. She’s repeatedly tried to talk me out of bringing Mason on the air, warning of an “irrevocable dissociative episode.” Yet, her description of a worst-case scenario sounds identical to what I’ve been going through every day for more than seven years. Therapy is taking too long. I’m impatient and need a breakthrough. And if I pull this off, it should garner the publicity I need to get a radio show in New York City, a gig I’m supposed to covet. On the brink of even greater fame, I’m disgusted that my macabre celebrity past and talent have wealth-creating potential. I’m still driven to succeed as everything inside of me collapses.
There’s no way I have the nerve to do this sober.
The office is usually desolate at night, and besides, it’s New Year’s Eve. I yank a bottle of Seagram’s 7 out of my desk drawer, fumble with the lid, lift it to my eager mouth, hesitate for just a blip—should I, or shouldn’t I?—and decide that I definitely should. The familiar burn hits my tongue, my lips, my throat, steaming warmly in my chest and stomach. I tilt the bottle back further, gulping compulsion taking over.
STOP, I tell myself. I catch my breath.
The bottle hits the top of my desk with a jarring thump, emptier but heavier. I even startle myself.
I cough, shake my head, blink my eyes several times, sigh, and instinctively retrieve the soft pack of Marlboro Lights crumpled in the right front pocket of my Levi’s. Tobacco flakes fall from the cellophane on to my shirt. I pop a bent cigarette in my mouth and it sticks to my dried lower lip as I reach both hands to my chest, patting myself down in search of a light.
My Zippo is in the left pocket of my jeans.
I stretch out my legs, recline in the chair, and inspect it like I sometimes do. Remembering…
(It was early in the morning on June 3, 1994, and I’m lying face down on the ground, bleeding and laughing despite getting my ass kicked. My favorite pair of sunglasses crushed underneath me. My face, smashed. People literally stepping over me, no one asking if I need help. Why would they? They saw what happened. The must’ve thought I had it coming. They’re probably right. I definitely overreacted.
Something in the gutter reflected a glint of streetlight and caught my attention through the semi-blindness that comes with a broken nose. I stretched and caught hold of it, noticing that two of my fingers were dislocated, the knuckles bulging unnaturally. I ignored the pain, rolling over on my back with a groan. Buzzed and busted up, I inspected my find.
A Zippo lighter.
The Jack of Clubs was engraved on one side, and on the other—inexplicably—was a cursive “J” and “P” over the date “3/16.”
My initials.
My birthday.
Broken beer bottles and pea gravel poked into my back as I lay in the parking lot, holding the Zippo like a trophy in the soft moonlight and buzzing neon. I grinned but then grimaced as wet pain throbbed in my nose. I tilted my head to the side, gagged, hocked, and spit out a wad of blood and phlegm and—)
I shake my head. I’m back in the present. What startled me? Did someone knock on the door?
Management banned smoking in the building months before I arrived from Wisconsin. I flick open the Zippo anyway and light the crooked cigarette still stuck to my lip, take a deep drag, and blow a cloud of blue smoke toward the ceiling vent. Another quick inhale, then I drop the Marlboro, glowing tip down, into a cup with just enough stale coffee in it to hiss out the cigarette. I wave my hand at a lingering wisp of smoke as something catches in my throat and peels of wet coughing wrack my body, eventually settling into a wheeze after half a minute of near-choking. The headrush makes me dizzy, disoriented. My breath comes in tentative gasps as I try to get oxygen without sparking another spasm of hacking.
“Fuck me,” I gasp.
Someone is knocking on my office door.
My producer, Wafer, is talking and lightly tapping to see if I want him to come in. Each tap is a nudge, creating enough space between the door and the jam to peek and see if I’m choking to death. He’s talking work shit, hoping for an answer to confirm I’m all right, knowing that I hate being asked if everything is OK, especially when it never is. Nothing is fine. It’s all fucked.
“… and the new bumper music is in, like you asked. Some really choice cuts, man. I got the Lauryn Hill stuff, Bittersweet Symphony, Gravity Kills, Cracker and Stabbing Westward. The show’ll sound tight, Jeremy. There’s already twelve callers on hold. They all want to confess. Anyway, man, can I come in? Or are you coming out? Are we cool?”
Wafer is a nervous bastard. He hasn’t relaxed since the day we met on June 6, 1999, at 2:48 p.m.
Aaron van Waveren is a gaunt 6’5” and has a patch of the finest, blondest hair I’ve ever seen, like a newborn baby’s. Tall, thin, and nearly albino white, I started calling him Wafer on the day we met. My boss sat us both down in the office after my last producer quit (she’d replaced the one who’d quit two months earlier) and said that he thought we’d make a great team and a bunch of other corporate bullshit. I couldn’t decide what I thought of Wafer at first, but he made eye contact with me, smiled, and did not say, “It’s going to be great working with you” (which I hate). Instead, he told me, “No one thinks I’ll make it six months. There’s a pool, so I bet on myself. You’re stuck with me for six months and a day because I need that four hundred thirty-five bucks.” I laughed and our boss relaxed.
We’ve been together ever since. He takes a lot of shit from me and always covers my ass.
I should treat him better. The oldest coping mechanisms are the hardest to change.
I clear my throat.
“Give me, like, two minutes, Wafer,” I manage. “I can’t find my phone. I forgot where I put it.” Lies.
The familiar warmth of a Seagram’s buzz is rushing into my chest and flashing heat across my face. I take one more pull from the bottle. Less burn. So I take one more sip.
My head is really swimming now.
Vaguely, I consider how little I’ve slept the past four weeks, and especially the last two days, fretting over the show. It wasn’t a good idea to drink that much, that fast, without eating, now minutes before the most important show of my life. I get up slowly and kick the office chair backward. It skitters across the room before careening into the wall. I shove my lighter and cigarettes back into my pocket, grab my headphones, and take a few tentative, off-balance steps toward the door.
Dread settles in.
Anxiety rises into my chest, hammering away on my heart and again turning my mind to the memories that I have to confront again. Sheer willpower keeps me upright. I’m sick to my stomach, like I want to puke but know that I won’t. How the hell am I going to do this? What the fuck was I thinking?
(the electrical ballasts are popping and arcing and exploding and I don’t flinch and Mason keeps coming and points his gun at her and I watch it happen and why didn’t I close my eyes so I couldn’t remember?)
Calling it a memory is inaccurate. I relive the moments, feel the fear, see it like a fresh religious vision. An unhealed, festering wound. The memories come at me constantly, becoming more acute, more painful, more vivid, and more debilitating with each occasion. I’m in two places at once, two times at once, past moments confusingly fighting with the present for space in my today.
I feel myself walking toward the studio. Christmas decorations are still up, tired and useless. Red and green and tinsel and scotch tape. I hate Christmas. It’s so fucking happy and stupid.
A salesperson, oddly out of place in the building after hours on New Year’s Eve, appears in the hallway. She smiles and starts to talk, but my ears are ringing from alcohol and gunshots reverberating across time. I can’t hear what she’s saying. I watch her smile disappear as she averts her eyes and dodges past me. Do I look that bad? I mumble something; it’s probably incoherent.
There are four radio stations in my building. One of the other studio doors is open, a Rock station, blaring sound into the hallway. I recognize a song. It’s Metallica. “Nothing Else Matters.”
I stop.
HOW the FUCK is it THIS song playing while I’m walking by to do THIS show? I want to run away, but I’m transfixed. I hate it and love it. It’s the terribly perfect soundtrack for what’s about to happen.
I’m transfixed, listening. Alcohol and this song and images of the day I keep reliving and the pressure I’ve placed on myself to make this a turning point are overwhelming me completely.
I’ve made a big mistake.
I cannot do this show tonight. It’s going to be a disaster.
I feel a lump in my throat, telling me I won’t be able to speak. I’m probably mute. The thought of talking to anyone, especially Mason Reynolds, causes an intense shiver to run up my spine.
My mouth is dry. My tongue is fat and lifeless in my mouth.
A piercing noise drowns out all other sound except Metallica and my thoughts. A brutal ringing.
My eyes are burning. They feel bloodshot. Every breath is labored.
I want to run to the elevator and escape. I want to smoke a cigarette. I have to get out of here. I’m about to commit career suicide and crater my life in front of hundreds of thousands of people and have a nervous breakdown live on the air and end up in an asylum scribbling confessions on the wall and I feel rivers of flop sweat running down my forehead and dripping off my nose and I wipe at them with my shirt and I really need something sweet to get the taste of Seagram’s out of the back of my throat and—
There’s a hand on my shoulder. I jump out of my skin.
Wafer’s voice. “Whoa, man, hey. I got you a 7-Up. And there’s coffee and water in the studio. You look like shit. I mean, I wouldn’t say it if you didn’t really look shitty but wow. You realize you’re on in nine minutes, right? We’ve got to do this, man. How much have you had to drink? When did you start drinking? Have you slept? Have you eaten? What can I do, man?” Wafer is rambling. Freaking out.
“I’m copacetic, bro.” I’m not the least bit convincing. I’m a terrible liar when it matters. I’m a mess.
One second later, my mind explodes with living memories of my darkest day, helplessly watching life leave Sarah’s body, failing to protect her, Mason’s screams reverberating as the gunfire echoes dissipate. Adrenaline and anguish and regret and searing nerve pain. Gushing bullet wounds. My blood. I know it’s now, December 31, 1999, at 9:57 p.m., but it feels exactly like it did then, on May 23, 1992, at 7:54 a.m.
Vertigo.
I turn to see Wafer’s stunned face, then I’m looking up at the ceiling, as I topple over backward and crumple to the floor. Tunnel vision. Soft sounds in the distance, like people shouting in a soundproof room. Are they yelling at me, or for help? Doesn’t matter. Darkness collapses the light into tunnel vision.
The past won’t stay where it belongs. It bleeds over the present as I see and feel it all unfold again.
Imagine having the perfect memory. Recalling events, dates, details with precision. Never forgetting a birthday, an anniversary, facts for an exam, a bill's due date, a password. Easily bringing forth to mind your happiest memories, every detail of your wedding day, your child's birth, every time you laughed until you cried, every compliment you've ever received.
Now imagine that you also can't forget any of the traumatic things that happened in your life. Any of the particulars. Your mind cannot let them go, cannot block them out, cannot protect you from the terrible, the horrific, the catastrophic.
That's what it's like for Jeremy Peoples, a radio talk show DJ in Washington, DC. He has hyperthymesia (though not mentioned by name in the book, and I thought it was called an eidetic memory, but that's related to visual images), an incredibly rare, flawless, autobiographical memory. While it has its benefits, how can he heal from his trauma if he can never let anything go? If he's haunted by his own memories in debilitating detail? Jeremy believes he's really to blame for the shooting that happened at his high school in 1992, and has been tormented by the memories and guilt ever since. Now, on New Year's Eve 1999, he attempts to gain forgiveness from the shooter himself, live on the radio. A caller draws him back to his hometown in Wisconsin, and he's catapulted back into danger.
Author Jeremiah Beck does a phenomenal job with Recollection. Beck's writing is exquisite and compelling, with a fully expanded character arc in Jeremy. His descriptions are vivid and the prose is fluid, perfectly executing Jeremy's spiral into addiction and darkness, desperate for redemption, while touching on aspects of the human condition that are still relatable even without those specific experiences. "The only thing I love about time is that it keeps moving. When mistakes are made, more opportunities to win or lose rush toward me unrelentingly. I control none of it." I highlighted several more quotes while reading.
Despite Jeremy's flaws and continual poor decisions, I was instantly hooked to his story and it had my full, rapt attention from start to finish. I was cringing, but couldn't look away. I was completely engaged, desperate to turn page after page, regardless of the 500+ page count.
This is perfect for fans of dark, gritty, psychological thrillers, and readers who can stomach graphic content. Because it goes there.
Recollection is an excellent debut, and I look forward to reading more of Jeremiah Beck's work in the future.
Content Warnings include: mass shooting, suicidal ideation, graphic suicide attempt, heavy drug and alcohol abuse/addiction, graphic language, violence, gun violence, bullying, PTSD, and more.