Books

Terminal Wake: Stories Of A Boy 1979-1991
published March 2021
The followup to my debut novel, Dweller On The Boundary. Now on sale at Amazon.

This book is a funeral for a time, place, family and one boy's childhood. Not all funerals are sad, some are celebrations. Terminal Wake is a fictional collection of twenty-three stories inspired from actual events from a boyhood in the rural American South between the end of the disco laden seventies to the beginning of the nineties. These are stories written with compassion and humor about love, betrayals, abuse, tragedies and spirits that go bump in the night.

They are written from the perspective of a boy, a different kind of boy that was considered gifted and he was gay in a place and era that was not always as accepting. The primary setting is Paulding County, Georgia on the outskirts of Atlanta before the sprawl captured it like kudzu. It was just as unique as the boy, filled with eccentric, outspoken, strange and sometimes dangerous characters in the rolling hills and forests between Pumpkinvine Creek and the red dirt roads. The dysfunctional family at the center of it may or may not resemble yours.

These are new stories not contained in my novel, Dweller On The Boundary. Many of the same characters from that book inhabit this one too with just as much high strangeness.


Dweller On The Boundary
published August 2020
Christopher Michael Rhodes is a gifted child growing up in the 1980s in the strange, rural community of New Hope, Georgia in the American Deep South. In this debut novel by Chris M. Vise, inspired by true events, follow a young seven year old boy for the next ten years as he learns to navigate life, love, death and his family that crumbles like the red Georgia clay in a drought. He will draw upon the game of chess and the lessons of the dark wooded ridges of nature surrounding him to maneuver across a boundary of secrets, abuse and betrayal from attempted murder, suicide to sexual abuse and mental cruelty. In the Rhodes family, nothing is as scary as the sound of a cracking pine tree in an ice storm.
Now on sale at Amazon on Kindle and in paperback and hardback. Available in print at Barnes & Noble, Book Depository and other fine booksellers. 


Update on my next novel can be found here.

My decades of silence about the past is over and the writing has begun.