Another Son of Man
Tim McLaurin

Down Home Press
978-1-878086-96-9
$24.95 hardcover
5 ½ x 8 ½       
210 pages
Published in 2004
Fiction, North Carolina

"Inside the circle, I will return to you," were the words scrawled amidst dark, penciled swirls in the final hours of the life of a young man, without family, dying from cancer. Among his final requests was that his ashes be spread over a remote lake in the swampy wilderness of eastern North Carolina.

Thus do three people of widely divergent backgrounds and ideas, who knew the young man only in illness and death, come to find themselves marooned on a tiny island during a major hurricane.

Junuh is a young, black oncologist from the Low Country of South Carolina, where his parents were lost in Hurricane Hugo. Ruth is a bisexual, New Age healer. Reese beat alcoholism and drug addiction to become a fundamentalist street preacher.

On the island, this unlikely trio encounters a bearded, autistic hermit who calls himself Son and seeks to lure them to a place he calls Paradise.

In the face of the storm, the three come to terms with themselves, one another, natural forces, life, death, and spirituality.

Tim McLaurin finished this novel only three weeks before his own death from cancer on July 11, 2002. He is entombed in a sepulcher built by himself and friends on the farm where he grew up in Cumberland County, North Carolina. “Inside the circle, I will return to you,” are the words that grace the sepulcher’s brass plaque.