OFF TRACK
Cover art by Stephan Blundell
Edited by Michelle Roberts, Deena Mauldin
Genre: Mainstream
ISBN: 978-0-9784906-3-8
Length: Novel
Format: eBook
Price: $4.99 (B)
Publication Date: November 15, 2008
What kind of cowboy do you want to be?
At 12 years old, Gary Sanderson found himself in the oppressive juvenile detention facility for boys called “Radcliffe.” But at 16, he has a chance to start over in a new town with his foster parents, Don and Gail Morgan. He hopes to build a new and “normal” life, but the past catches up to him as the problems of a small town erupt all around him. These problems spin out of control when the girl he loves asks him one question: “Will you kill my father?” It is a character study of a boy, shaped by abuse and burdened with the death of his father, trying to survive in a world he hadn’t expected to find.
An Excerpt from "Off Track"
What kind of cowboy do you want to be?
Gary thrust Butchy into his back pocket. He couldn’t see through the puffed bruise of his right eye, but he felt it all the same. He carried the dead weight of the gun with him and inched down the stairs, step by step, following his mother’s terrified screams. Her strained voice echoed off the walls and bled through the pores of the house. For years those screams defined the house. They oozed at every moment, even through the silence. It seeped into Gary’s ears.
His thoughts, in those moments, weren’t his own. The world wasn’t real to him anymore. The air felt strange, as if swirling around him like a giant whirlpool, floating him toward some inevitable force intending to smash him to bits. Then it rushed him head on.
At the bottom of the stairs, he stumbled to the entrance of the kitchen and poked his head around. His mother leaned on her knees before his father, her hands clamped onto his pants leg for support. She pleaded with him, crying like Gary had never seen her before, molten tears pouring through her eyes and streaming down her raw face. His father struck her hard across the cheek and the slap echoed against the walls like a hand on wet concrete.
Gary fingered the gun and lifted it slowly.
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REVIEWS
By Loretta Sylvestre of WordsWellWritten.com: "Off Track," by Michael Hultquist, is a startling, disturbing, deeply honest novel, and I want the world to know about it.
It opens at the moment of critical choice in the unblessed life of twelve-year-old Gary Sanderson, the moment when – beaten, frightened, worn down, and powerless but for the cold metal in his hands – he shoots and kills his father. He pulls the trigger too late to save his mother from the man's cruelty. She dies hours later. The action shifts quickly after that to the time four years later when Gary's world tilts from the holding pattern made possible by imposed structure, and the heavy iron pendulum of choice swings belatedly toward him, as unstoppable as the trains that thunder symbolically through Gary's days and nights.
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