The weave of trauma and time

A girl who eats a Michigan city. An ordinary man who wrestles with being a werewolf once a month. Sometimes funny, sometimes absurd, and always engaging, one just never knows where a story or novel by Central Michigan University Professor of English Darrin Doyle will lead them. 

Let Gravity Seize the Dead, Doyle’s forthcoming book, is yet another departure for the author, as his first novella. It will be published by Regal House Publishing, releasing on July 9.

“I’ve always been a fan of the novella form, books like Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, and Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams. I’m thrilled to offer my own work in this form,” Doyle said.

Focused on a family who moves into a cabin in a Michigan forest, this Gothic novella shows two separate timelines (1907 and 2007) and investigates the lingering pain of trauma, and how it becomes woven into families. The two timelines “braid and bleed together,” Doyle said, “suggesting that time itself is an illusory concept.”

“It’s a sort of ghost story about a family haunted by past tragedy,” he continued, “suggesting the idea of intergenerational trauma – how our traumas are never lost but instead become part of the fabric of our selves, in the same way the natural world folds past and present into an eternal cycle of life and death.”

Regal House Publishing, an independent press located in Raleigh, North Carolina won the 2021 Independent Publisher of the Year Award from Forward Reviews.

“Each year they put out a wide variety of compelling contemporary fiction,” said Doyle. “It’s very cool to be a part of it.”

Let Gravity Seize the Dead is available for pre-order at Amazon and also at Regal House Publishing. Stay tuned for a local launch at Sleepy Dog Bookstore this summer, and on campus in the fall.