“A humorous survey of love gone awry… Will keep readers guessing, laughing, and crying until its satisfying conclusion.”
D. Donovan · Midwest Book Review2007. The world was vibrating with the future. Erin wasn’t vibrating yet. Erin was post-divorce, searching for new love on dial-up. That sucked.
Then she found him. Jaime. (Hi, me.) He smelled good. He listened. His body? Eh. But he had a great laugh—not a chortle. She felt aligned, like her chakras and planetary placements just did yoga.
It was the happiest she’d ever been. It lasted two months. Long enough to believe. Not long enough to be careful.
Then, he was gone.
Set in the year the iPhone came out, A Light and Tragic Love Story follows Erin, a sculptor newly out of a hollow marriage and unsure whether love still applies to her at all. Living in a rural area, still on dial-up, she drifts through online dating and small routines, expecting very little.
She remains entangled with her ex-husband, Gerry — familiar, persistent, and increasingly unwilling to accept that it’s over. Then Jaime arrives without ceremony, offering something quieter, steadier, and harder to categorize. What begins casually accelerates quickly.
Falling into a drug-induced spiral involving catfish and a bottom, Gerry sets in motion a chain of events that will cost everyone something they can’t get back.
Darkly funny and quietly devastating, this is a novel less interested in how love begins than in what survives it.
“Erin reached out and traced the nearest sculpture, a contoured torso. No arms. No head. Incomplete, but still standing. Each piece was meant to be the goddess Eris holding an apple. Erin hated explaining why she only sculpted Eris. Even when people knew the myth, they remembered only the buzzwords. Chaos and destruction. ‘To the fairest.’ She smiled. She’d understood it even as a girl. It was rage. Feminine rage.”
© Colton Lawrence
He closed the medicine cabinet and looked at himself in the mirror.
Hot, for sure, but not fresh.
He looked thirty-two. He’d never looked his age before.
Until now.
The weight of something bad was fucking with his face.
He could fix it with diet and exercise. Tanning. That would do it.
Maybe makeup?
No makeup.
If it got worse and he started looking thirty-five, he’d investigate makeup.
He sighed. Out of nowhere, he got a wave of something foul. Depression? He’d never been depressed before.
It suddenly dawned on him that life wasn’t easy.
Before he had a kid, he loved the idea of having a kid. He just wished it had been a boy that he could name Thresher.
Erin got to name the girl, so she picked Joy. Stupid name.
The doubt started soon after she was born. Holding Joy at the hospital felt like an imposter moment — he feared he would drop her.
Erin never said he was a bad father, but he never felt he could do right by Joy. He probably would have been just fine with little Thresher.
My father was never there, so I won’t be either.
Where the fuck did that thought come from? He hadn’t thought about his father in years. He never wanted to be like his dad. He had to admit he was following the same path.
“You create what you fear.”
Candy told him that.
Huge tits, Botoxed face, and endless costumes. You’d think she would have been more exciting. Instead, she had those stupid spiritual books she tried to force onto him. Stupid New Age bullshit.
He fucked his wife over for a self-help-spouting “masseuse” named Candy?
What the fuck was I thinking?
Mitzy came out from under the couch and started to say something.
He threw his cup at her.
Mitzy shot out of there like a crack whore responding to a call from her dealer.
Can I ever be forgiven?
It was the most profound question Gerry had ever asked himself.
For the first time in his life, Gerry realized a choice had been made, and it might have fucked up his life — and maybe the lives of others.
Almost as quickly, a thought roiled into his mind.
If he could just get Erin back, none of this would matter.
He’d just have to win her back.
At any cost.
Continue Reading© Colton Lawrence
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“A humorous survey of love gone awry… Will keep readers guessing, laughing, and crying until its satisfying conclusion.”
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