Gott'im's Monster is YA coming-of-age speculative fiction for teenagers with heads. A New England Gothic recasting of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Gott'im's Monster is set in the mountains of Western Maine, 1808 and the 1980s. ""Gott'im refers to Gottheim, a small Maine town. The locals call it Gott'im. If I had to reduce a complicated, vivid book to a one-liner, I'd say that Gott'im's Monster is a Maine-grown dialogue with Shelley's Frankenstein, opening up the arc with questions about how and why the irrational can irrupt into what we think of as rational life. The land and the town are as...

Like her namesake in Pilgrim's Progress, Chrischana Twitchell is fleeing a destructive life in a place she thinks of as the City of Destruction. With her three sons she returns to Gottheim, Maine, and an uncertain welcome in the Meguntic Mountains she loves. Called Gott'im by its inhabitants, this rural village and surrounding wilderness are changing with the influx of newcomers. Tensions between descendents of yankee settlers and those 'from away' have made it a place in transition where neighbors struggle to know one another in a real way. Return to God's House is the first book of The...

WITHIN WITHOUT is the second book in God's House and THE GOD'S CYCLE, the story of a rural Maine village in transition. Full of local color and character, it continues the story of Chrischana Twitchell's return to Gott'im, and introduces Peter Prince, her troubled common-law spouse who follows her from the desert to reclaim his family. As a stranger in Gottheim he experiences bitter truths, and redeeming hopes, about himself and the nature of life in God's House.

GOD'S HOUSE IN WINTER is the third book in The God's Cycle. Here begins increasing mythic qualities as Jasper Mountain comes alive, and nature redounds with fury to her glory. The wild creatures and inhabitants of Gott'im suffer.... And, too, they benefit from the recoil of human erring on a grand scale. When it so happens, in God's House, setting the stage for them to enter into God's Wilderness.

MYSTERY GOTTHEIM starts off the second theme in The God's Cycle, entitled God's Wilderness. Mystery Gottheim is a mid-mudseason night's dream. Its landscape is troubled under a burden of soot, falling ash, and drizzle-outpouring of a tire fire creating its own weather. Many of its characters become lost and disoriented in the woods and on the mountain slopes, some with loving partners. Here find apparitions and some scattered bones in an old deserted cemetery. A road appears to some and not to others, the well in a cellar falls to an abyss, a carriage house hides a mysterious vehicle. But, as...

Climax of THE GOD'S CYCLE, Balder's Wilderness is a dark fantasia of the afterlife. Balder Simon, the Gott'imite hero and Vietnam veteran, searches for his lost teenage son, Daniel, on a wooded mountainside in Western Maine. There Balder meets up with a stranger, claiming to be a local and offering to guide him. Perplexed and distrait, Balder agrees, but soon realizing that his love and dedication toward his son may lead him to realms beyond this life and time.

A small town in transition. The loves of Balder Simon. An omniscient Abenaki storyteller. The Gott'im tire fire burning its way to hell. A monster-killer mentoring a dead man. An invitation to Ragnarok. Jasper Mountain speaks. The Battlefield of Time. THE GOD'S CYCLE - A year woven in the imagination of God.

GOTT'IM'S MONSTER 1808 is coming-of-age speculative fiction. A New England Gothic recasting of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Gott'im's Monster is part of The God's Cycle and is set in the mountains of Western Maine, 1808. Its fantastic elements sparse in beginning, The God's Cycle moves through its story in time and place with increasing mythic emphasis. This version of Gott'im's Monster is abridged, leaving out the townsfolk ""chorus"" of its1980s frame, within which the original 1808 story is pictured. Gott'im's Monster 1808 is the more compact tale.

Looking for understanding and adventure, two giants of English literature-the fictional Jack Lewis and Mark Twain-meet as if by accident to begin an exploration ranging through Great Creation and the imagined supernatural. They experience aspects of the astronomical, of terrestrial geography and biology, and of Western cultural history. Two others take part in their conversation, Renaissance astronomer Johannes Kepler and Scots romanticist George MacDonald. By the author of The God's Cycle, Gott'im's Monster, and Five Points Akropolis. This edition has an author's introduction.

How to live in rural Maine? How--in the 1980s, when descendants of Maine's settlers wonder about our coming out of the Rust Belt in search of work, in search of a life? They were not bitter about our coming here, where jobs were already scarce--they were incredulous. Why did we come? Sometimes I answered, ""God."" God brought us, the formerly middle-class inept, to live among these most hardy and canny of make-do people. God brought us to experience life in Maine, where my spouse sometimes worked turning and trimming four thousand boards a night, waking to drive one hundred miles round-trip...