Closing Arguments

by Sarah Avery

Bob is a normal guy, if by normal you mean raised by civilized Theosophists who didn't really have time for him or his younger sister. When his parents die suddenly he's left with the job of cleaning up the mess they've left and dealing with his own response to people who were never there for him until it was too late. Unfortunately, now that they're dead they won't leave him alone.

Closing Arguments is a story about the family you make when the family who raised you wasn't enough. It's about love, and sacrifice, and doing the right thing because it's right instead of easy, and it's for everyone who ever felt weird or out of place being just a normal "guy." Part occult mystery, part domestic comedy, "Closing Arguments" plants the quest for enlightenment and immortality squarely in the suburbs of the Jersey Shore.

PDF

First published May 30, 2008

About the author

Winner of the 2015 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, Sarah Avery has published contemporary fantasy in Jim Baen's Universe, and her sword and sorcery stories have appeared in Black Gate, where she writes a regular column reviewing fantasy series. Her first book to appear in print is Tales from Rugosa Coven, a trio of linked novellas about a coven of very modern Wiccans in a New Jersey even weirder and more absurd than the one you think you know. An anthology she coedited with David Sklar titled Trafficking in Magic, Magicking in Traffic, is forthcoming from Fantastic Books in May 2014, and will feature stories by James Enge, Elizabeth Bear, and Darrell Schweitzer. Most recently, a Kickstarter campaign allowed her to hire a dream team to publish a novella, The Imlen Brat, with World Fantasy Award winning editor Betsy Mitchell for the developmental edit, Nebula nominee C.S.E. Cooney for the audiobook narration, and Kate Baylay for illustrations.

Avery is an escaped academic who taught way too many sections of freshman composition. After earning a doctorate in English with a dissertation on modernist poetry, she spent a few weeks driving around the Adirondacks blasting Tori Amos on the car stereo and asking herself, What would happen if I stopped holding back? The answer turned out to be a return to her first literary love, fantasy fiction. As a mildly entrepreneurial private tutor, she's able to get almost all the best parts of teaching with almost none of the annoying parts.

She grew up as an Army brat in Kentucky and Korea, Japan and Germany, with a long enough run in Maryland to think of it as home. She moved to New Jersey for grad school and accidentally made a life there for 20 years. Sarah married her high school sweetheart and lives in Maryland with her husband and sons.