The stories in Ghosts of the American Dream follow the theme of people confronting the dark reality of their lives in contemporary America.

                But these lives are not confronted by the typical specters of love and loss, or even death. They are enjoined with the ghost-world realities of uniquely American inventions, from overwhelming self-interest to uncontained flights of the imagination. And when death emerges as an individual story’s theme it is not accompanied by the typical sense of loss that we all feel, but a subtle effect on those reflecting on the nature and the subtext of death, and how it affects the living left behind.

                In “More Light”, James Robley lays dying in a nursing home; and yet, his focus is not on the meaning of his death, but on the meaning of the dreams that have become the final connection to the living world that he must soon leave. And through this contemplation of these dreams comes an understanding of the precariousness of life, and the eternal light of those things that we hold sacred.

                In “Bread on the Water”, Ray Garner searches for some understanding of his wife’s death, and the balance of religious certainty that he has carried with him throughout his life. Garner finds that when death becomes an open door to philosophical change we are often freed to embrace a new understanding of life, no matter the effect on the integrity of our previous beliefs.

                In “Growing Up Dead in the South”, Miller tries to reconcile his nomadic existence, and the sense of love he’s never been able to actualize in his life, with the haunting implications of a childhood tragedy.

                But death is only one the theme of the book. The tenuous hold we have of our personal reality in American society is also examined, and the implications of looking beyond the façade of belief that would otherwise keep us whole and sane.

                “The Society of Birds” illustrates the effect that a simple unwelcome intrusion of the past has on Evelyn Scheuer, who cannot see beyond her own evolved sense of decorum and dignity to sympathize with the difficulties of an old childhood friend.

                In “The Prophet,” Ricardo Rios, university student and elegant cynic, must try to find a way to understand the implications of his coincidental meetings with an old man who has assumed a new and divine role.

                In “Virgin Rose”, Oralia is confronted by the uncooperative reality of her relationship with an abusive man who does not share her desire for a calm and meaningful life away from the poverty and the impoverished family love that she has only known.

                The two longer stories in the collection, the novelette “The Boxer”, and the novella “Little Auschwitz”, take the theme of identity and responsibility to the limits of the American reality in which each of the protagonists finds himself.

                In “The Boxer”, Louie Heath’s career as a fighter is over—he no longer has the physical ability to compete, and now he is suffering severe psychological symptoms that threaten his sanity. He is pursued by disembodied voices, but has no means to fight them other than by the violent means that has been the guiding philosophy of his professional life. In an attempt to reconcile the meaning of his mental illness, he ignores the potential of his medical treatment and finds a new philosophy of social engagement by following the same voices that earlier tormented his life.

                In “Little Auschwitz”, Rosh Lilly is tormented by dreams of his internment in the Auschwitz death camps—but Lilly has never lived anywhere but Brooklyn, New York, and so must reconcile this seeming inconsistency with his own aged perceptions and the advice and counsel of his friends and neighbors. Clouded by the starkness of Lilly’s nightmares, though, is his fear that his children cannot possibly love a man who was so terrible at keeping the faith. Lilly believes that only his late wife’s influence kept him from complete incompetence as a father, and now that she is gone that incompetence must be repaid by unrelenting visions of a tortuous past.

                These, and eleven more stories found in this collection explore the strange and often macabre effect of the American experience on the human psyche.

                Here is an excerpt from “Little Auschwitz” of one of Rosh Lilly’s dreams of the death camps:

                “Lilly woke in the night.

                Lilly woke from a dream of laboring in a crematorium after the bodies had been burned. But this was wrong; he knew that he could never have been part of the Sondercommando, those who washed the bodies of filth after the gassing, processed them to the crematoriums and thrust them into the furnaces. He would never deign to be one of those men, would he? Pulling the gold from silent mouths, shaving the hair from thoughtless heads. No, he would never be part of such a terrible practice. But his dream was vivid, and his body moved as the others’ bodies, binding the limbs and sliding the dead toward the flames like carcasses of beef in a slaughterhouse. The stench was overwhelming, a combination of burning flesh and potent chemicals. The cloth he wore against his mouth did nothing to filter the scent of abuse. The shovel, which turned the ashes in barrows, wore through his palms and left stigmata that were neither Jewish nor Christian. His young body threw the spade into the hot ashes and released them from the chute, which would shortly bring another set of lifeless faces before him. The heat wore through him like a plague, and the soot glazed him with the marks of the Sondercommando. He felt the weight of each body in the shovel, he felt the spirit of each life waft from the simmering crypt.”

                These stories were written with the intention of rescuing the storyteller’s art from both the mundane conventions of commercial fiction and the self-absorption of contemporary literary fiction by following a simple philosophy that we have seemed to abandon in American letters: to write stories about people. Realistic people with real personalities facing the incredible variety of dilemmas and crises that we all confront daily. This is the heart of meaningful fiction and the philosophy that will continue to create meaningful works of art in our country. And if you feel that this kind of fiction is important to you as a reader, please feel free to order my book, to read the rest of the material on this website and to look for future works that find their origin in this philosophy.