Future projects by Stephen Markley
Telling War Stories: A Novel
In another lifetime, Matt Fago, Mick Hannahan, and Tim Clymer were friends, bound by the easy bonds and petty jealousies of childhood. As young men, they discovered how easily those bonds were severed and forgotten, each of them striking out for a vastly different future.
One boy stayed in their hometown. One went to college. One went to war.
Years later, random measures of fate and circumstance have brought all three of them home for one hot Ohio summer. Despite the differing paths their lives have taken them, the three men find a familiar camaraderie in each other’s presence—a reassurance that their destinies have coherence and structure.
Soon, however, they begin to discover that we are all products of the past—of our darkest fears and brightest dreams—but most of all, that we are the creatures of our most closely guarded secrets: those things that once revealed, can never again be shuttered from the light of day.
The year was 2003.
Ash was a whip-smart, med-school bound stoner.
Dane was an observer.
Bill was a star and a sex addict, who wanted to change the world.
Tony was a broken heart searching for a fix.
Justin was a son of a war hero, brother of a Marine in Afghanistan.
Mike was an athlete, who just wanted his life simplified.
And Will… Will never knew what he wanted.
The year was 2003. George W. Bush was in the White House. The Iraq war had concluded. American Idol was still inexplicably popular. The seven of them were freshly-minted high school graduates. The future was murky. Their lives were never-ending.
As Tony once put it to Bill and Justin while crammed into the backseat of a Camaro on a dark country road, whiskey and adrenaline throbbing in his veins, “Guys like us,” he said. “Guys like us were built to die young.”
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