The Undiscovered Country

Stories within stories, endings within endings. George King discovers a manuscript while going through his recently deceased mother’s effects. His father says the manuscript simply appeared on her computer at the Maryland hospital where she worked as a surgeon—twenty-five years earlier—and advises George not to read it. He ignores the advice and reads the narrative in a white heat. English teacher Steven Vaughan is shot in the head by one of his students, Freeman Ames, in the opening page. Vaughan floats out of his body where he observes the action of the rest of the story as a disembodied spirit. There follows a hostage crisis in the classroom, a trial filled with unpredictable twists and flamboyant lawyers, and a flashback to events that nearly destroyed Vaughan’s family on a lake in Maine. Through it all, a being of light guides Vaughan’s spirit while his body lies in a coma. He exists in a realm between life and death, watching the present, reliving scenes from his own life, and witnessing those from the lives of others. In the end he must choose life or death. But the biggest mystery of all is whether he wrote the story while in a coma or whether the manuscript is a hoax. George searches with Vaughan’s daughter for a possible clue to the truth.

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