Leatherstone

1960 -- an American town, a 12-year-old boy from the wrong side of the tracks, an escaped killer found lifeless in the woods.Champ Garrett doesn't fit in at school, doesn't fit in at home. He lives on an old farm on the outskirts of the sleek new housing development that defines the prosperous times; his widower father is on the road selling, his sister inhabits a world of the "slower" child who'll never catch up, and his guardian uncle spends most of his time drinking at the local tavern. All Champ has are his comic books, the science fiction movies he loves, and an undeveloped inclination toward science. Fascinated by the Frankenstein movies he's seen on television, Champ rigs up an electrical device in his family's unused barn and attempts to revive dead animals found nearby, but he's never successful and is finally abandoned by the few friends he has for being too weird, too nonconforming. Wandering aimlessly in the woods one frigid day, he finds the lifeless body of a man and determines to show his former friends just how successful he can be in reanimating the dead. Six months earlier, Jasper Leatherstone escaped Death Row. Forced to flee his refuge of the last half-year, the mass murderer found himself on the run during a brutal winter storm and fell, a heartbeat from death, in the frozen woods. And now he's jolted into life on the fantastic machine of a 12-year-old budding mad scientist and finds himself in an uneasy world of childish innocence and half-remembered nightmares, with no recognition of the man he was or the crimes he committed. But Champ finally has a true friend -- maybe one for life.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

JASPER LEATHERSTONE HAD ESCAPED.A dragnet was out for him, its dogs howling through the night. At the edge of a frozen river he could hear them coming and took a chance only the most desperate or insane would. With superhuman strength he hurled a boulder through the ice and plunged in after it. His body shocked past feeling by the cold, he swam like some polar animal under the ice, and when his lungs gave out he took his knife and broke through the underside to gulp down frozen air. But the current grabbed him and tore him downstream, shattering him on rocks, dragging him to the bottom, flinging him up to crack his head on the ice ceiling, and slamming him against the submerged root of a tree. He pulled himself along the root, though the current did its best to tear him away. Smashing his fists through the ice at the shore, he drove the knife into the tree, pulled himself through the jagged break and fell on the black earth, twisting and hissing like a reptile. When the police and dogs got to the river three miles back, the trail was lost.

About the Author

David Patrick Pabian is a novelist and screenwriter, as well as writers' editor and film development consultant. He divides his time between Los Angeles and a hill-town near Lucca, Italy.

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