Ronald Simpleman is not about to take the fall for the faults of the fathers. He may be a pansy, but he’s no patsy. While his conscience has been in full-blown crisis mode for three quarters of a century, this self-exiled hermit feels like it might be finally safe to ease out of hiding.
Misguided in childhood through the faults of his father, just as his grandfather had misled his dad, Simpleman has been burdened by secrets he’s lugged around since he was a kid. Lying low as a recluse on family acreage clinging to the sloped outskirts of Crested Butte, he has managed to outlive ten presidents and—at least so far—outsmart those who might be after him.
Now, with what might be his final winter upon him and too little time left to expunge his guilt-ridden soul, Simpleman believes he just might get away scot-free as he begins to round up his closeted skeletons for the short trip to his final resting place in the Simpleman Family plot.
A fictional memoir encompassing a period of time in rural, wild west America from 1946 – 2025 when men were men . . . and sheep and homosexuals were rightly nervous.
Ronald Simpleman is not about to take the fall for the faults of the fathers. He may be a pansy, but he’s no patsy. While his conscience has been in full-blown crisis mode for three quarters of a century, this self-exiled hermit feels like it might be finally safe to ease out of hiding.
Misguided in childhood through the faults of his father, just as his grandfather had misled his dad, Simpleman has been burdened by secrets he’s lugged around since he was a kid. Lying low as a recluse on family acreage clinging to the sloped outskirts of Crested Butte, he has managed to outlive ten presidents and—at least so far—outsmart those who might be after him.
Now, with what might be his final winter upon him and too little time left to expunge his guilt-ridden soul, Simpleman believes he just might get away scot-free as he begins to round up his closeted skeletons for the short trip to his final resting place in the Simpleman Family plot.
A fictional memoir encompassing a period of time in rural, wild west America from 1946 – 2025 when men were men . . . and sheep and homosexuals were rightly nervous.
There was no casket, for reasons obvious to everyone in attendance. A visibly nervous Mitchell Carson had never written or delivered a eulogy before; had never felt this compelled to do so. There was a sheen of perspiration atop his shaved head that seemed to be the bullseye on which the 80s-era track lighting of the slightly modernized sanctuary had been trained. The Simpleman family—which meant Harlan at this point—could have held the service in Gunnison, which had a nicer and larger church. But it was winter in the Rockies and asking folks to travel thirty-five miles on icy roads didn’t seem practical.
A month earlier, using People Search online, it had taken Mitchell all of seven minutes to get beyond a free-trial paywall to unmask Harlan Simpleman’s now unlisted phone number in San Francisco. Talking on speakerphone to the brother he’d met in person only once before and with whom he more-than-suspected he hadn’t left the greatest of impressions, it had taken Mitchell less than ninety seconds to lay out his case for delivering the eulogy. After a jumbled but appreciative inquiry about the state of Harlan’s hip replacement—a medical detail Harlan was surprised to learn the caller even knew about—Mitchell had to clarify that he was referring to when Harlan’s new hip had popped out of its socket. This had never happened, but it had seemed pointless to correct the record, so Harlan just awkwardly played along, assuring Mitchell he was all better and good-as-new now.
To the hearing-aided ears of the last surviving Simpleman from the original Crested Butte clan, Mitchell’s insistence that he be the one to deliver Ronald’s eulogy almost came across as sincere, honorable . . . and very much a relief. As Harlan hadn’t thought this far ahead about his younger brother’s funeral service, there wasn’t any need for persuasion, but he couldn’t stop Mitchell from listing his reasons. Harlan had no interest in taking on the task. Not because he wouldn’t know what to say and not because he was too emotional or sentimental. It was because Harlan had been feeling directly responsible for nearly six weeks now for the meddlesome provocation that had led to the accident that became the reason people needed to gather for a funeral in the first place.
Now Harlan sat in the 143-year-old sanctuary of the Union Congregational Church—which he had occasionally attended with his family as a kid but hadn’t been inside since their mother’s funeral in 2010—observing its distinct mustiness. Given the long buildup of candle smoke and furniture wax, the countless weddings and funerals, the body odors and perfumes and leaky diapers of the congregation’s infant parishioners, and the trace scents from the Glade Plugins that he could see in the wall outlets from the front pew, Harlan couldn’t tell what was making his nose itch but strongly suspected the twin floral sprays of tiger lilies, positioned either side of the pulpit, that he was informed had been special ordered and paid for by Mitchell Carson. Neither spiritual nor superstitious, Harlan felt out of place—not just in church, but in most situations generally. He had never cared whether others noticed or remembered him or if they would be talking about him now that he’d reappeared or not. He’d assumed locals had written him off and had stopped talking about him the moment he relocated to California from Crested Butte—and that was sixty-four years ago, immediately after graduating from high school.
Maybe it wasn’t the lilies, and he was just allergic to being back home. This hypothesis made the most sense and rang truest. Harlan had falsely supposed that few knew or interacted with this quirky solitarian who was also his only sibling, but to his pleasant surprise, several dozen townsfolk had gathered to pay respects to Ronald Simpleman, his younger brother by three years. Ronnie and Harlan had both grown up in this pocket-size town tucked into a valleyed nook on the western slopes of the Rockies. His little brother—who was different from Harlan in almost every way and had been since the beginning—had returned to Crested Butte not even a decade after leaving. He’d claimed it was to care for their aging parents, but Harlan and their folks, and Harlan was fairly certain most of their parent’s friends too, had quietly suspected Ronnie’s teaching career must have blown up for him to have boomeranged so quickly. At the time, Ronald had telegraphed he had zero reservations about returning to his birthplace, whereas Harlan had resolutely refused to do so. Now that the last of his family was gone, Harlan reckoned this would be the final time he set foot in Colorado. He wouldn’t be here now if it hadn’t been for his brother’s sudden passing.
In retrospect, which is all you have left when somebody dies, Harlan knew he should have kept his mouth shut. He hadn’t needed to butt into his brother’s affairs when he’d phoned him with what turned out to be not only an upsetting but apparently fatal piece of gossip. But as it had become customary for more and more months to elapse between their already infrequent telephone check-ins, Harlan needed an excuse to pick up the phone and so passing along some dirt on one of his brother’s former students seemed to fit the bill. Shifting his weight now from one butt cheek to the other on the unforgivingly uncomfortable wooden pew, Harlan wished he hadn’t made that call. Odd was it that this former student he’d called his brother to gossip about was there sitting next to him now in the front row of the Union Congregational Church about to eulogize his teacher and Harlan’s self-cremated brother.
A decade or so earlier, Mitchell Carson had established a Google alert for Ronald Simpleman to keep tabs on him in the absence of regular contact. In the intervening years, Mitchell had forgotten all about the alert until he received a notification on his phone citing the Crested Butte News article that detailed the conflagration and tragic killing by fire. Previously, the terms of engagement between former student and former teacher had been roughshod and sporadic over the decades. More recently, their relationship had inarguably turned frosty on account of the dustup they had in 2017 on the heels of the publication of Mitchell’s third book. The ambitious novelist had written a chapter into the story based upon his teacher and their unique relationship in far more detail than Ronald would have never in a million years been comfortable disclosing. Mitchell had insisted to Ronald, well after the novel was published and out in the world, that the names and places he’d referenced—particularly in Chapter 18—had been so heavily encoded and wouldn’t have been decipherable by anyone else. Not surprisingly, his panicked former teacher had a very different take on this and felt both accused and exposed. After a few years of silent treatment, an eventual written apology arrived in the mail from the offending author with the poison pen. This peace offering achieved some measure of détente, but hackles were up that never came down, and trust between them had been the irreconcilable casualty of their relationship.
Now, as the young church pastor signaled with a nod that it was time to begin the service, Mitchell rose from the forward pew that had been reserved for family which meant him and Harlan. He walked the short distance to the pulpit that—for this day and purpose without the focal point of a casket—had been relocated under the large, round stained-glass window with its eight-petal rosette motif in the Colorado State colors of blue, yellow, white, and red glass. The scene, which would have been aesthetically pleasing to the deceased, suggested that God, Himself, was standing outside and sticking the business end of a kaleidoscope through a hole in the church’s façade. Mitchell attempted to clear his throat of a sudden phlegm frog. He separated and lined up the two printed pages on the slanted surface, closed his eyes, and lowered his head for dramatic effect. Then, he began.
“I don’t know you and you don’t know me, but we all knew Ronald Simpleman. Mr. Simpleman was my high school teacher in the 70s when I attended Stevensville High School in Montana.” Mitchell looked up at the small group of mourners. “Go Yellowjackets!” he said, jutting a fist into the air. His gaze settled on a young family of four in the front row, huddled tightly together across the aisle from Harlan Simpleman even though they had the rest of that whole front pew to themselves. The handsome, thirtysomething father with a buzzcut forced a courtesy grin at the high school reference. He sat shoulder to shoulder with his wife and their young daughters in pigtails—the eldest with what looked like a first-prize blue ribbon pinned to her yellow dress. All four of them exhibited puffy red eyes and seemed to sniffle in turns.
Mitchell continued. “Stevensville was, and probably still is, a sleepy little hick town with less than a thousand people—about the size of Crested Butte, I imagine. I didn’t fit in there, and neither did Ron Simpleman, but man, am I glad we were both there at the same time. Despite our fifteen-year age difference, we understood each other and recognized what made the other tick. He was geeky, fresh out of Stanford grad school, and bursting with liberal ideas—a big-city transplant plopped down in the middle of Big-Sky Nowhere. I was popular—at least with the girls—which made me a target of some of the school’s biggest bullies. Mr. Simpleman, I think, recognized aspects of his younger self in me. He went out of his way to be my biggest cheerleader. His encouragement saved my life, and not just in high school.”
Now that he’d started his speech and had already gotten what he came to Crested Butte to confirm—that his teacher’s house and all its contents were incinerated beyond any measure of salvage or evidentiary incrimination—Mitchell paused to wager whether he could abbreviate this eulogy and perhaps catch an earlier commuter flight back home, or if he should stick to the script. He figured funerals didn’t make the best stage for improvisation, especially when you didn’t know and couldn’t easily read your audience. He plodded on, switching to his second sheet of speaking notes with the practiced dexterity and anticipation of a concert pianist’s unsung page-turner.
“Mr. Simpleman—as I called him before calling him my friend—gently exposed me to his way of thinking when it came to what he called the faults of our fathers. He showed me in a hundred different ways that it wasn’t just about the dad who conceived and raised me, but about the father figures—just like Mr. Simpleman—that I would encounter on my journey. Those who would teach me and reach me, and most importantly, who would love and respect me for who I was and whatever I turned out to be. He decried the faults of the fathers who made stupid and stubborn choices not to be role models of decency, tolerance, and understanding, but who instead instilled in their kids the ideas that racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and transphobia are somehow normal and acceptable. Ronald blamed the fathers who were bullies who had been raised by bullies and who would raise bullies of their own, trapped in a cycle they weren’t sensitive or intelligent enough to break out of. Fathers, he said, have been failing their offspring and damaging our better humanity since the beginning of time, and it was because of them that too many of us hate, oppress, discriminate, demean and engage in petty scuffles and endless wars. Mr. Simpleman also told me it was the faults of our fathers for not teaching us about all the different types of birds and bees when giving their talks about the ‘birds and the bees.’”
Mitchell paused to catch his breath and remind himself he was standing in a church full of people whose politics and values he did not know or even care about, delivering a message they maybe didn’t want to hear. He once again thought about skipping over the next paragraph and wrapping things up before he got himself run out of town. But then he thought about what Simpleman the showman would do with this center stage moment. He gripped the pulpit with both hands and jumped into the deep swirling whirlpool of his sermon.
“I remember Ron Simpleman feeling pretty adamant that until fathers started showing their children the Big Picture and teaching them about the queer birds and the silly bees that were a part of Nature, too, humans would stay stuck intellectually and wouldn’t evolve to realize the full potential of our species. Now, that’s some hefty thinking, but like I said, Mr. Simpleman was straight outta Stanford. He wanted to change thinking and improve outcomes in the lives of the young people he was teaching. That’s just who he was.”
Out of the corner of Mitchell’s left eye, he sensed movement in the front row. He glanced up from his notes and saw the young father withdraw the arm he’d been using to hug his wife and two little girls, and tip forward, planting his elbows on his knees just as a tear dropped from the edge of one of his flooding eyes onto his light-blue suit pants.
“I don’t know about your upbringings, but about the time I turned ten or eleven, my father purchased a four-volume box set of The Life Cycle Library and pointed to where it was wedged between the Index volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Reader’s Digest Great World Atlas at my eye level on the family bookshelf. That was the extent of the sex talk that I never got.”
Mitchell glanced at the young pastor to check if his eyebrows were arching in consternation or if perhaps the holy water in the font at the back of the sanctuary had started boiling. The congregation seemed engaged and not the least enraged, so Mitchell continued.
“My dad never told me that some boy birds were attracted to other boy birds, that some wolves, like Mr. Simpleman, preferred to be loners, and that there are girl bees that preferred the company of other lady honey makers—and that all of these variations were okay, even completely natural. Was that because my dad didn’t know this himself? Or was his ignorance the fault of his father for not teaching him? Or his father’s father before that? Thankfully for me, it was Mr. Simpleman the educator who stepped in where my father and his father and his father’s father had all fallen short because they’d been brainwashed too and hadn’t been strong or brave or enlightened enough to break this enduring cycle of perpetual intolerance. To the fathers inside this sanctuary and everywhere beyond these walls, I implore you to teach your children better or else the faults of the fathers will continue to handicap and sabotage every generation yet to come.”
Mitchell had improvised that last bit and worried that he was grand-preaching now sounding like the politician or embassy diplomat he’d once aspired to become before he’d landed on writing as the safer calling. He’d mostly made his point with his eulogy so far but there was one more piece of business he felt he needed to address, more with Ronald than with this bystanding congregation of innocents who maybe were and maybe weren’t paying attention to his sermon.
“A few years into my university career, at age twenty, I learned I had cancer. I found myself stuck back in Stevensville in my parents’ house, shuttling back and forth to Missoula for chemo and surgeries. Throughout this awful ordeal, Ronald—by then a good friend—kept me entertained, cerebrally engaged, and hopeful. Sitting side by side in his stuffy attic apartment, we dove with abandon into the world of foreign cinema and music. I remember him exposing me to surrealist movies by directors like Luis Buñuel and Marcel Duchamp. He had this viewing device he said he picked up in Berlin that was prone to overheating because the electrical current was of course different there. This thing was half movie projector half View-Master and he balanced this contraption on his lap on top of a Stevensville phone book so the tops of his thighs wouldn’t get too hot. Aside from films, I also remember his love for Michael Franks.” Mitchell’s eyes squinted as a smile blossomed across his handsome face and his tear factory cranked up water wheels behind each of his green olive-colored eyes. “For those of you not familiar with Michael Franks, he is this smooth jazz musician and singer/songwriter that Ronald revered. He heralded him as the leader of the quiet storm movement in R&B radio. I guess this was around the late 70s. Michael Franks instantly became the soundtrack of that part of my life too.” Mitchell used the heel of his right hand to squeegee away a burgeoning tear.
“Mr. Simpleman was my acting coach, my director, my English-Lit teacher, my mentor, my friend, and I suppose my muse. He deserves full credit for launching me into adulthood, for getting me through my cancer battle, and once I began writing seriously, he became my go-to beta reader for every one of my ten novels. I would have asked him to read my latest, but for many reasons, I’d been holding it back, rewriting whole passages, reworking the plot, letting the story ripen—unsure, and not for the first time, of what Ronald’s reaction might be. Sadly . . .”
Mitchell stopped, biting his lower lip and letting loose a couple of persistent tears he’d been fighting to hold back. “Sadly, I will never know, now.”
On a deep inhale, he continued.
“About the time Michael Franks released his album Skin Dive, in 1985, Ronald was already scratching out his post-teaching life in San Francisco. I had returned, cancer-free, to the University of New Mexico. We both raced to record stores to see which of us would be the first to review the latest from our favorite musician. Somehow, we both landed on the same song as our favorite from that album. It was the third track, ‘Your Secret’s Safe with Me.’ This instantly became the theme song of our forty-eight-year-long friendship.”
Mitchell looked up from his papers, his upwardly tilting chin directed his gaze onto the open timber-framed white ceiling of the Union Congregational Church. This movement served to redistribute his fresh tears that had been mounting a prison break over the low walls of his thickly lashed eyelids. In this pause, he filled his chest with enough oxygen and courage to get through the final part of his speech.
“In closing,” he started to say just as that pesky phlegm frog hopped up from deep in his throat like it was about to croak out a protest. A quick, hand-muffled cough cleared the way. “I’d like to recite a few lines from that Michael Franks’ song now, in celebration and in memory of our brother, our teacher, and our friend, Ronald Simpleman.”
You’re secret’s safe with me
You’re searching for someone
Whose got no lies to conceal
You’re secret’s safe with me
Waiting for someone
Whose eyes will tell you it’s real
Live and learn wait your turn
Don’t you know the deepest love
Comes to those who wait
Why be smart, hear your heart
Leading you to someone who
Know it’s not too late
Your secret’s safe with me.
Mitchell detected more open sobbing now, emanating mostly from the girls in the front pew as their pigtails quivered and beyond the front row heads on both sides of the sanctuary had bowed in unison. He rejoined Harlan Simpleman in the front row, the oak pew creaking almost maleficently as he sat down.
Harlan patted and squeezed Mitchell’s thigh in faux appreciation, while internally, he was seething. He’d long harbored a grudge from the bit of personal history he’d had with Mitchell Carson some years ago when they’d met for the first time, but before this memorial service, Harlan had also skimmed an online synopsis of the novel Mitchell Carson’s publisher was readying for release. What he read there made him highly skeptical that his dead brother’s secrets were safe with this opportunist. He frowned now, watching Mitchell Carson, his performative eulogy in the can, make the hastiest of exits from the church just seconds after the pastor had blessed the thin flock with his parting benediction.
As mourners idled in the vestibule, waiting their turns to pay respects to the surviving Simpleman who stood hands clasped in front of him just inside the wedged open set of church doors, the young father from the front pew sensed a gap in the one-person receiving line and herded his young entourage toward the exit. Harlan lifted his sorrowful face in recognition.
“Junior,” Harlan said, shaking the outstretched hand using both of his own. “It’s so good to see you. Thank you for coming. I don’t know that I have met your wife and daughters before.”
Junior spread out his arms to bring the three women in his life into the circle. “Harlan, this is my wife, Sofie, and our two daughters, Madeline and Rose.”
“I am delighted to meet you,” Harlan said, bending to shake the hands of the two girls in matching dresses. “You’ve won a prize, I see.”
Junior issued a nervous laugh when the blushing daughter couldn’t overcome her shyness to speak for herself. “She won her class science fair,” he boasted. “With a great deal of help from your brother.”
“Pepperoni helped me win!” the freckled girl practically squealed as though someone had just pressed a button to animate her out of her shyness.
Harlan had a quizzical look on his face and Junior jumped in to translate. “From birth, really, the girls have always known your brother as Papa Ronnie. But when Madeline was quite young, she thought we were calling your brother Pepperoni.”
The adults laughed as both girls, ages 12 and 10, spun into their mother’s protective embrace. “Madeline insisted she be allowed to wear the ribbon to the memorial service today,” Sofie added.
“Ah, I think I remember hearing something about this,” Harlan confided to the parents. “You should be very proud, dear,” he said to the older of the two sisters. “And I am proud to learn that my brother could contribute to your scholastic achievement in some way.” Realizing he was maybe talking above her comprehension level, he added, “I am happy knowing Pepperoni could help.” She swiveled her head that had been buried in her mother’s skirt and flashed a delightful gap-toothed grin. Junior used his meaty hand to pull Harlan into a half hug which normally would have been against Harlan’s will, but Junior had the physique of an athletic lumberjack and for Harlan it wasn’t an altogether unpleasant experience. “Thank you for coming, Junior. It’s lovely to meet your young family.” The girls hopscotched through the doors and into the high-altitude Colorado sun, gulping in the mountain air as though they’d just broken surface after ascending from great underwater depths.
After hobbling with his cane back to the pew at the front of the sanctuary—feeling he needed some time alone after the last of the respect-payers had left the premises—he sat there in a low-grade daze, taking a moment to remember his brother and their shared upbringing. Harlan hadn’t been the best brother. The truth was, he hadn’t tried all that hard. Their parents had harped on him since Ronald was born to be his brother’s protector and to set the example of good behavior, but Harlan’s mind and selfish heart hadn’t seen this as his obligation, so he’d shirked it, plain and simple. If anything, he’d led his brother astray more often than he’d shown him the way. In his defense, this had been out of boredom and not maliciousness.
Still, having Ronald die first wasn’t the right order of things and Harlan couldn’t help fixating on that fact. He’d always figured he’d be the first one to go, since he’d had a few health issues, ranging from a chronic iron deficiency (likely due to his vegetarianism) to the irregular heartbeat he’d had since infancy. Plus, he was the eldest by three years. But the fallacy of this life-expectancy forecast was that little Ronnie had always needed to be the first at everything.
Before retreating to the abandoned sanctuary for this quiet interlude, Harlan had asked the pastor if he’d mind phoning Rocky Rides to arrange for his airport shuttle pick-up. Now, the pastor popped his head back inside the nave from his adjacent office to confirm the van was about twenty-five minutes away and that he was welcome to remain in the church until it arrived. This ETA would still give Harlan plenty of time to get to the Gunnison-Crested Butte Regional Airport for his commuter flight to Denver, where he’d connect with his redeye home to San Francisco.
In the weeks since his brother’s accident, he’d become both resigned and comfortable with the realization that he no longer had any living relatives binding him to Crested Butte. Immediately listing the family acreage with the first realtor that topped his Google search, and hoping for a quick sale, he looked forward to having no property ties here, either. He’d known when he got the call from the retired fire chief, who was an old family friend, that this would be the last trip he’d make to the place where he’d grown up—the place he’d gotten the hell out of as soon as he could.
Harlan had initially brokered his deliverance from what he referred to as “redneck evil” decades ago by delegating the oversight of the family holdings to his younger brother. It was Ronald who had been given uncontested power of attorney, including medical directives for each of their parents, whose wills provided for the brothers to co-own, maintain, and dwell in the family home for as long as they both desired and needed. Given Harlan’s twin requirements for culture and life at sea level, offset by his disdain for ignorance and altitude, Ronald had been instructed by his older brother to keep the home fires burning and their parents cared for until they passed. Harlan figured it was pointless to quarrel over semantics now that he’d lost his lifelong scrimmage and debating partner, but he still felt compelled to defend the proposition that keeping the home fires burning should not have been misconstrued to mean burn down the home. For fifteen years after the last of their parents had passed (their father, Paul in 2008, followed by their mother, June, in 2010) Harlan had tried to light a different fire under his brother’s butt—one that would get him to sell the property and use his half of the proceeds to downsize and move anywhere he wanted to live in the world. But little Ronnie couldn’t be coaxed or budged from that house. That tediously long-running campaign by Harlan the Harper, as his brother had nicknamed him, had finally ended now, and cataclysmically. Ironically, as things turned out, and in keeping with his younger brother’s dramatic flair, the caretaker designate had been perfectly capable of lighting his own fire. As the fire chief’s report and soon, Ronald’s epitaph would read, Ronald Paul Simpleman (1946–2025) perished in a house fire that destroyed everything.
The subtext: everything except Harlan’s manufactured but enduring childhood trauma.
About a week before the funeral, Junior—the newly promoted rural volunteer fire chief—had confirmed with Harlan by email that he had towed the charred hulls of the three vehicles off the property to his auto-body shop for parts and scrap. This meant that all that was left of the Simpleman legacy now was an insurance claim, a hopefully expedited real estate transaction if he was lucky, and the brief coda of Harlan’s dwindling years, which he hoped would play out as undramatically as possible, in keeping with his anything-but-showy-character. Sitting alone in that church, Harlan felt oddly relieved by this catastrophic and yet tidy ending to nearly all the irritants that had been bugging him.
From the shadowed wings of the nave, the young pastor—having removed his regalia to expose either a moth-nibbled or a campfire ember-singed black turtleneck under bibbed snow pants held up by suspenders, one of which hung off a shoulder—approached the elder in the front row. He not-so-subtly jangled his keys, anxious to hit the slopes for a few downhill runs before the lifts stopped operating at 4 p.m. Hearing him approach, Harlan cane-leveraged his weight off the pew to a standing position that favored his good hip. The pastor reached out a set of neatly folded papers.
“The fellow who delivered your brother’s eulogy left these notes on the pulpit. I thought you might like to keep them,” he suggested in a soft whisper.
Harlan unfolded and examined the pages, gauging the value of such a keepsake. He could see that the speech had been printed on recycled paper. Printed on the back of the first page was a copy of his rental-car reservation, and on the back of the second, a Google map with driving directions from the airport near Gunnison to the rural address of the Simpleman home, or what was left of it. If the infamous writer had stopped by the ruins before the memorial service to rummage around the ashes and debris, searching for something he thought belonged to him, then Harlan hoped he had found it. Because Harlan had no intention of doing any such reconnaissance himself.
I’ve been incredibly fortunate—or not, but that’s not relevant here—with this batch of books. A lot of bangers, a lot of diversity, fiction and non-fiction alike. It helped lifting my expectations with every story squared away, which is… not a great thing, to be honest, since having expectations in this field is a dangerous thing.
However, Curnes and his Simpleman lived up to those. Exceeded them, even. I closed his book with deep satisfaction and the usual touch of sadness about being done with a good one.
Why’s that? For starters, and bear with me here, Curnes states that neither AI nor ChatGPT have been used in the creation and writing process. It shouldn’t be a revolutionary thing; it should be the bare minimum, since I am not interested in reviewing the inner process of a machine, but here we are. Thank you, Mr Curnes.
Then, the story itself is a moving, funny, dark thriller centered around the lives of Harlan, Mitch, and Ronald. They’re all tied together, and we’re finding out why in a non-linear timeline. Non-linears are always a bit tricky to handle, but Curnes deals with that in a beautiful way: walking backwards in time, from funeral to birth. I think it’s a great concept; skipping is far more common and overused, while this take is a fresh, intriguing one.
Themes, Simpleman is a queer story but the queerness is not performative. It's an integrant part of the plot, it's sexual identity and preferences, and it's not all about it. Another fresh take I have to tip my hat to.
From a technical standpoint, everything is on point. Again, I wasn’t expecting anything less since this isn’t Curnes’ first rodeo: five published books under his belt, columnist, awards-winner, if there’s someone I can trust with correct syntax and no messy sentences, it has to be him.
I would double-check the spacing of Simpleman, though. I have no idea if my Kindle messed it up or what, but the lack of spacing on a screen makes for a hard read.
5 stars on GR and a thank you for helping me wrap the year with a great story.