Fiction
Bryan Furuness
Bryan Furuness is the author of a couple of novels, The Lost Episodes of Revie Bryson and Do Not Go On. He is the editor of a few anthologies, including the forthcoming An Indiana Christmas, as well My Name was Never Frankenstein: And Other Classic Adventure Tales Remixed. His stories have appeared in New Stories from the Midwest and Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. He lives in Indianapolis, where he teaches at Butler University.
2020 Fiction Shortlist: Do Not Go On
The witness protection program is supposed to be a fresh start, but for the newly inducted Easterday family, it’s more like a personal apocalypse. The mother refuses to leave their home in Baltimore, the father sinks into paranoia, and seventeen-year-old Ana gets stuck caring for him in the forsaken town of Morocco, Indiana, wondering if she’s lost her future as well as her past. When a former hitman named Zeeshan offers them a way to come back home, Ana has to determine whether she would get her life back or lose it entirely. Over the course of a few months, she’ll make her way through an underground world of reformed gangsters, hungry politicians, and teenagers smuggled in from the villages of Kashmir, all of them trying to find the line between secret and identity.
DO NOT GO ON is a story about secrets, second chances, and the ways that storytelling can save your skin and soul. In this book that is part crime confessional, part coming-of-age tale, the Witness Protection Program and college application process are two different ways of getting at the same question: Who are you, and who will you become?
2017 Emerging Finalist: The Lost Episodes of Revie Bryson
Revie Bryson, a precocious and dreamy kid from Paris, Indiana, has decided he’s the second coming of Christ: and why not? His mother, a captivating performer and inventive storyteller, likes to tell him made-up Bible stories, which she claims are “lost episodes,” or outtakes from the King James version. Wild as prophecy and seemingly just as coded, these charming and dangerous tales feature steel mills, cars, and transistor radios, among other artifacts not generally associated with life at the beginning of Anno Domini. After years of listening to these stories, is it really so far-fetched for Revie to believe that God might show up on his doorstep one day like Ed McMahon and the Prize Patrol?
Faith can be fickle, though, and Revie’s belief in God and his family is scuttled when his mother suffers a crisis of identity and leaves home to pursue her dreams of stardom in Hollywood. Over the course of a year, one family and one boy must learn to sacrifice and forgive in order to be born again.
