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Dirt
Abel and Janine Bellamy face a dilemma all too present in our society: their comfortable lives on property they own are rapidly slipping away from them. Pressured by their community to sell out and retire—thus allowing for a large commercial project that promises jobs and taxes for the economically depressed local economy—they find themselves under attack, verbally and physically. We’ve heard this story before but, in this case, their lands are more than a possession; the couple is possessed by them, as are Abel’s life-long friend, Harlan, and his people: those forced from the land by the Kalapuya Treaty of 1855. They are aligned against a majority of the community, government representatives, and a party boss politico who manipulates them and events through a number of local and national officials.
Living History
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What would you do if you had 11,000 years to kill? How would you spend your days, and where, with whom? This is the dilemma LH’s protagonists, Mia and Hugh, face. The surviving passengers of a space vehicle that crashes in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest in the ninth century C.E. send them on a rescue mission, to keep the crash from happening. The problem is, their trip back is a desperate “shot in the dark,” and it is experimental. The experiment fails. Instead of returning to save the ship a short time before the crash, they find themselves in 9,000 B.C.E. scrambling to survive while avoiding an ancient species trying to kill them, but also the ancestors of the doomed ship’s crew, who have spent millennia coming to earth to monitor human evolution, perhaps in a last-ditched effort to save their own world’s failing ecosystems.
Of His Bones
A small coastal fishing village becomes the site of an open battle between what was, is, and shall be, with global economic forces pitted against defenders of the environment, their ways of life, along with the indigenous people who have lived here since time immemorial.
“Purdy delicately limns the consequences of modern expansion in elegiac and poetic terms. . . . Yet this remains a thoughtful and compelling investigation of the mercilessness of modern capitalism and its indifference to the human costs of progress. A sensitive portrayal of modernity’s discontents.” Kirkus Reviews
Riding Shotgun into the Promised Land
Home from war, a wayward veteran finds himself on a long journey, running from an accidental death through the contested landscape of middle America, following the Oregon Trail into an uncertain, perhaps dangerous, future where one’s gender and ethnic origin may have a profound effect upon survival. (Currently out of print.)
Rogue World
In his last steps in the rituals to manhood, Kai’s village is attacked by a raiding party possessing powerful weapons, who kidnap his sisters. Against orders of the leaders, he sets out to find them, in the process discovering his people’s complicated, violent history, and founding a new world while reuniting a fractured and seemingly doomed people. (Currently out of print.)
Forthcoming, I Hope
Cumulative Effect
Set in a small logging and farming community facing changing times and economies, tensions are brought to the foreground by the sudden, violent death of a man whose friends find themselves in danger due to his hidden life. His death comes with a horde of profiteers. Standing in their way is a host of environmental activists, union functionaries, Native American locals, strong women, and Matt’s coworkers, Mike and Sherry, who struggle to survive in a conflict they struggle unravel.
Ivory Towers
A former philosophy professor, who for his own reasons has become a janitor, uncovers some troubling anomalies in the construction of a new Biology Building on campus, and these incongruences launch him on a road to an explosive act of desperation and vindication. Told in alternating voices, the narrative begins with a “terrorist” attack on the building, slowly revealing a cast of characters, with an emphasis on characters. As we come to see the ways they make and remake themselves from the stories they create, we come closer to the ways our “terrorist,” Ed, thinks, and the conclusions he has reached about our contemporary lives: our illusions and destructive realities.
