Meet New Member Douglas Wells
Douglas Wells
Douglas Wells is an award-winning author with a unique interest in and perspective on the tragic, comical, and the redemptive in his characters.The Secrets of All Secrets received the Literary Titan Silver Award, was a Finalist in the 2017 Independent Author Network Book of the Year Awards and a Finalist in 2018 Amelia Island Book Fest and Expo Book Island Literary Award.
How We End Up received the Literary Titan Silver Award, was a Finalist in Literary Fiction for the 2018 International Book Award, and a Finalist in Literary Fiction for the 2018 American Fiction Awards.
His forthcoming novel, The Mourning Islands, will be published sometime in the next year.
Douglas is also a Reviewer for the New York Journal of Books.
Zane, a seminary and grad school dropout, obtains a USB drive left by a cloaked figure on a bridge in the middle of the night. The drive’s content offers Zane “The Secrets of All Secrets”—a tantalizing proposal for someone who has nothing left to lose. Following the drive’s directions, Zane heads to Florida where he encounters Dali, a poor waitress who received an identical USB. Initially clashing, they band together, taking a chance that The Secrets are genuine as they receive more instructions from their USBs. Four conflicted government operatives; an extremely tall corporate executive with an extremely short, scholarly hit man in tow; and two crackbrained, fringe-element, anti-government separatists are after The Secrets—and are all willing to kill to get them. Zane, Dali, and their pursuers encounter an armadillo festival, visit a nudist resort, and hang out with a presumed dead ’60s rocker. Pandemonium occurs at each venue with Zane and Dali one step ahead of everyone… that is, until all parties convene for a climactic confrontation over The Secrets.
BEING RESCUED IS NOT THE SAME AS BEING SAVED.
Jackson Levee, an ambitious young college instructor and writer, saves nine-year-old twin girls, Hadley and Haley, from drowning in the Gulf of Mexico. He writes a poem titled “After the Rescue” based on the incident and receives critical acclaim and a wide readership as the result of an appearance on a popular national television talk show.
The twins mature into beautiful but troubled young women. Jackson’s success leads him to a professorship at an esteemed university in the Carolina mountains where meets LaVeda with whom he has a temporary happy marriage, but his ascendant star falls soon thereafter. Hadley marries a womanizer and discovers through a chance meeting that she is gay, loses the relationship, and sinks into alcohol and drug abuse. Haley suffers a depressive episode and afterwards begins an unfulfilling affair with her older supervisor, subsequently marrying an army reservist who is horribly wounded in the Iraq War and whose PTSD threatens everything.
Through twenty-five years, Jackson’s, Hadley’s, and Haley’s recklessness in sex, love, marriage, and life produces wild and horrific results. They struggle to transcend their misfortunes and realize their destinies.