How Like an Angel is the story of Archibald Angel. With his career going nowhere and a marriage in decline, Angel retreats to a rustic cabin in northern Michigan to make a new life for himself. In spite of his forward thinking, Angel's move is in many ways a journey into the past. Besides lacking modern comforts, the cabin conjures the ghost of Angel's troubled childhood, when his undertaker father took the cabin in trade as payment from a widow who couldn't otherwise afford the cost of her husband's burial. After Angel's mother subsequently fled, abandoning her family to recover from a mental breakdown, the cabin was an escape for father and son. While Archibald Angel revisits his knotted and difficult past, his ex-wife and young son contemplate their future. Slowly, with unexpected help from an unpredictable woman, Angel realizes he too must find a way to begin again or risk failing his son as his own father failed him. With pathos, humor, and unflagging generosity of spirit, How Like an Angel takes us deep into the hinterland of the human heart and discovers there the source of the love that keeps us holding on against all odds. Jack Driscoll is the author of four books of poems, a collection of short stories, and three novels. He is also the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, the Pushcart Editors' Book Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, the AWP Short Fiction Award, and seven Pen Syndicated Project Short Fiction Awards. He is currently Writer-in-Residence at Interlochen Center for the Arts in northern Michigan. |
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