The novel you are about to read is a work in progress. What I am posting here is the raw, unedited draft – complete with typos and mistakes… The finished project will be vastly different. I started this project in 2011 and I stopped working on it abruptly to let it cook for a while…
While I’m writing a much better version, you can read the old draft while the new one is being completed. Essentially, you get to read a version free, and if you liked what you read, you can purchase the complete polished version from book retailers everywhere.
I began writing this before I wrote and published my first book. The writing is far from my best… but there’s a story here, kids. The title is a working title. And again, I stress this is a very rough draft, cringeworthy (at least to me) to read in some places, but I thought this would be a fun way for you to read a developing work, and then read a finished product.
Enjoy...
Harglow was smoking as he watched them from the car across the street. He was alone. Tonight, he wasn’t a homicide investigator. He was shepherd from The Church of the Damned.
“Chloe, you’re so predictable,” he said to himself. “It’s a wonder it took me this long to find you.” He rolled his head over the car seat, stretching his neck. “How are you going to pull this one off, Chloe? He’s a teacher. Not some old, withering mortician.”
He used the smoldering butt of his cigarette to light another. “Better hope Kintry doesn’t get to you before I do. That would end badly.” He cracked the window to let some smoke out. “For both of us.”
Harglow glanced at the photograph in his hand. She hadn’t changed. With the exception of her hair, she looked exactly the same as the last time he saw her six years ago. She was not smiling in the photograph. Nor was she alone in it. It was their wedding photograph.
The Church of the Damned was founded by a Pentecostal evangelist named Garth Hollister. The pitch was simple. “We’re all damned,” he would shout, “if you believe anything else, you’re a fool. We ain’t saints. We ain’t lost sheep. We ain’t his chosen. We are damned, all of us, and there is only one solution to that damnation: Christ! And we need to choose him!”
Hollister’s ministry focused on individuals rejected by traditional ministries for falling off the wagon one too many times. His was a congregation of homosexuals, sexual offenders and addicts.
“My children,” he would preach to them, “I know you can’t help yourselves. God doesn’t want you to help yourselves. But he wants you to ask him for help. Will you ask him? Will you ask Jesus for his help?” His voice was soothing above their heads but fell with authority on their collective conscience. “You’re wondering, ‘if God gave us free will, why do I feel like this? Why don’t I have control over this opposing spirit? I didn’t ask for this, I didn’t choose this, I don’t want to be like this, but I am like this. I am like this because God made me like this!’” This was generally followed by a light applause and a tiny chorus of “Amen.” “But did he? Did he make you like that?” This would invoke silence. “I don’t believe he did. I don’t believe he made you to be a defiler, a sinner, doomed from the gates of your own conception. I don’t believe it. Not for a minute. No, I believe you are the product of corruption.” He always raised the volume and slowed his rate of speech on the word “corruption.” “And not just your own corruption, but the corruption of other men, of evil men.” And this is how he would woo them back: with the idea that their damnation was somebody else’s fault.
