DOGS OF PARSONS HOLLOW: Ripped from the Headlines

As this article makes so dreadfully clear, my novel DOGS OF PARSONS HOLLOW, about a woman’s crusade against the backwoods dogfighters she discovers living next door to her new country home, features a platform and basis very much rooted in reality.

As the author of a novel that makes clear its moral stance when it comes to these kinds of heinous and cruel bloodsports, however, it pains me to report that the depraved violence propagated by the man responsible for the dogs described in the news story from earlier this week occurred not in my fictional ‘Edgewater County, SC‘, but rather the actual place that I grew up, Kershaw County.

Certainly my intention in writing the piece was to entertain (the text doesn’t spend any undue time elaborating on the suffering of animals, for instance), but of course also meant as a didactic and edifying experience that grew out of my lifelong love and empathy for our animal companions, they who so depend on us for kindness, not cruelty.

Currently being shopped to the bix-six publishing houses by my wonderful agent Michelle L. Johnson of the Corvisiero Agency, if indeed this torn-from-the-headlines narrative makes its way to wide publication, it’s my hope and dream that readers who discover the book in the future will think to themselves, I can’t imagine anyone treating innocent animals in the manner this writer describes—he must have made it all up. Too bad that perception of DOGS will never be true.