12 Steps

by Darren R. Hawkins

Rain, the young man is thinking. Of course it would be raining. Not a heavy, cleansing rain that leaves the streets steaming and the neatly sculptured yards lush and fragrant. This is a gray drizzling rain. A rain that makes him think of places like England and Scotland as they appear in those disturbing late night films on cable, the ones in black and white that weren't particularly memorable when they were made and are even less so now...

278 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 13, 2010

About the author

Darren Hawkins lives in Owen County, Indiana with his wife and three sons. He purchased a B.A. in English from Indiana University so he could work in a field completely unrelated to his degree. When not writing science fiction, he divides his time between gainful employment with his alma mater as a database analyst and SQR developer and the Front Office Baseball League, where he has successfully been running his fantasy baseball team into the ground since 2002. He is disturbed by how pleasant it is to discuss himself in the third person.

Reviews

[Ksenija · Rating 5 out of 5]

About half-through the book I wondered ''Is there anything going on here at all? This guy's literally just describing typical events at a rehab facility''. Despite this fact, I enjoyed almost every word he wrote. The ending did not disappoint (left me thinking. a lot.), even though through the entire story, I kept waiting for something more massive to happen. The devil's in the details, I guess.
I can't seem to find a whole lot of info on the author, but there's no doubt that he's got a brilliant mind and vocabulary. And then some.

[Peter Coomber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dip your hand into a silk sack of adjectives and pull out a handful: miserable, exciting, bad, sad, clever, purple, mad, wonderful, gross, dangerous...

Remove the sad and the miserable, and you are left with a description of this mad, bad and dangerous to know book (maybe purple is taking things too far, unless you are inflicted by some weird colour vision defect).

This book is grim reading in the nicest possible way: meaning it doesn't have a happy moment or ending. If you are of a happy, cheerful disposition, then perhaps this book isn't for you; however if you are a bit deeper than that, then this book certainly is.

Read it: it is exciting, clever, wonderful, gross and mad, bad and dangerous to know.

[Lana]

When I first read this book, I had been working in mental health/social work settings on night shift for several years. Hawkins captured the "typical" night shift worker very well. I related to so much of what Ray said and thought, and it was the way I was trained too. I'm just thankful I never reached the point of being as jaded as Ray was. He's doing the job well, but he's losing compassion. And apparently that's a good thing? I know that so many people do this type of work out of compassion, but it's basically a defense mechanism to train the compassion right out of them and train "professional distance." As Ray figured out with the suicide boy, sometimes the counterfeit caring you're supposed to offer to people who are struggling isn't. They need more, and they push to try to get it. It breaks my heart to think that it's not okay to show humanity to people who are in need of genuine compassion from someone who understands boundaries.