Wilson Roberts

How long can Death be kept tied up in a sack hanging from a high branch of a maple tree outside the bedroom window above Jack Bean's fix-it shop, The Wizard of Odds? People think they know Jack. Although he denies the story, he has long been believed to have killed a giant who lived in the land above a beanstalk. Jack, the Novel, is a tale in which Jack's encounters and battles draw on myth and folklore from various cultures, philosophy and theology, and from the zeitgeist of our time. Jack's story follows him from his early teens, living with his mother in a Carolina mountain log home battered by the northwest winds of winter into a future in which he grows up during a period known as the Dissolution, the chaotic period following the breakdown of democracies, their economies and governments. He sets out to stop the northwest wind from blowing and meets the mysterious Jacob Ruach who tells him he has been chosen to maintain the boundary between what-is and what-might-have-been. Jack, Jacob says, is to be his successor. The encounter with Jacob Ruach leads to many adventures. After years spent wandering over the former United States fighting demons and monstrous creatures such as the Firedragaman, Jack ends up running his fix-it shop in a rust-belt town in the hills of western Massachusetts. Here he mentors Jaqueline Dubois, a thirteen year-old girl who grows into the woman who will replace him as a keeper of the boundary between what-is and what-might-have-been. And, he must decide what to do about Death tied up in that sack hanging high in the maple tree outside his bedroom window.

Somewhen Else is a story of Dave Heston and Laura Benson, who may have never met. Dave and Laura are each having intimations of a life in which they did meet while passing through the Philadelphia International Airport in 1983. Living thousands of miles apart, both seem to recall that after having talked in an airport restaurant, they canceled their respective flights and together booked a flight to New Orleans. Have they met? Will they meet? Somewhen Else is a story about stories. We all have stories. Both Dave and Laura tell us their stories, as well as tell us the stories told to them by people they meet and love. But all the stories can't be true. Can they? Following the 2017 hurricanes Irma and Maria, Dave, a widowed retired lawyer. lives in the cistern of his storm ruined home overlooking Coral Bay on St. John in the Virgin Islands. A poem and musician, in his youth he headed up "Big Dave and the Hestones," a band that opened for Bill Haley in the early 50s.Laura, also widowed, is a retired newspaper reporter living in a restored log home on Clarks Creek in Valle Crucis an unincorporated community in the northwest North Carolina mountains. She has been working on a book detailing a horrific murder and the subsequent trial of the killer. Like Dave, she is determined to live a full and independent life.In a third part of the narrative, David Henson and Laura Benson, longtime residents of New Orleans, are threatened by Reuban Beachamp. Beachamp, who has killed and evaded conviction was wrongly convicted of and imprisoned at Angola for a murder he did not commit.Somewhen Else is more than the story of Dave and Laura. Place and the relationship between place and human beings is central to the novel. Dave is a north American living in but not of a community that resulted from the displacement of people during the period of enslavement and abandonment, one that is in many ways a colony of the United States. In lesser ways, the same is true for the Appalachia where Laura was raised, has lived and worked. Both St. John and northwest North Carolina have seen their local cultures and mores affected by a colonizing tourist industry.Somewhen Else is a story about the importance of stories. It has a complex narrative structure. The first part of the novel is told in the third person by a journalist Dave Heston meets on a delayed flight as he travels from St. John to visit his son in Pennsylvania. Feeling he is losing control of his story; Dave cancels his agreement with the journalist and takes control of his narrative. The second part is his first person retelling. Laura's narrative is fully in the first person. Section three, written in the third person, tells of the life David and Laura have lived most of their adult years in New Orleans living in an apartment in the French Quarter.

There Will Be Time is a grab bag of a novel, a murder mystery, a comic look at life in a small college in the Carolina mountains where relations between faculty, staff, and administration are on a relatively first name basis and everyone seemingly knows everybody else's business.Wilson Roberts knows such places, having taught at Lees-McRae College in the Carolina Mountains, Paul Smiths College in the northern Adirondacks, Delaware Valley College in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Greenfield Community College in Massachusetts. He brings wit and insight into his depiction of campus life, as in his description of the single faculty apartment building at Banner Grove College: "The apartments had been built quickly and cheaply by a sub-assistant dean of grass cutting who hadn't spent a cent more than necessary to get an occupancy permit from the building inspector, who was his wife's brother."There Will Be Time will entertain any reader. It's a thrilling murder mystery filled with humor, suspense, a love of life in academic Siberia, and amusing insights into that life.

This novel asks two questions: What is evil? Does evil exist for its own sake? Was evil born with the creation of the Universe? Or is evil nothing more than human behavior taken to its most destructive extremes? Is evil a force or an aberration? The Cold Dark Heart of the World is a story of four strangers who must come together to confront the question of evil as they seek to find a way to defeat Fidget, an entity they will come to believe is driven by hungers older than time, hungers that have never been sated or defeated. Fidget leaves death in his wake as he moves from the wilds of northern Alberta, Canada to a small community in Montana, from there to El Paso, on to Starkville, Mississippi, and to Valle Crucis in the mountains of North Carolina, finally to Long Beach Island on the Jersey Shore. Shifting shape and persona, Fidget exists to hunt, kill, and devour his prey.Connected by profession, technology, dreams, intuition, and forces none of them understand, Luna Carnero, a police detective in El Paso, Dexter Malloy, a deputy sheriff in Park County, Montana, Ben Calloway, an Appalachian storyteller/shaman, and Wendy Mapes, a physicist from the Jersey Shore, unite in a stand against Fidget as he prepares to continue his feasting rampage on Long Beach Island.What is the nature of violence?Is violence predominantly a matter of testosterone? Fidget appears male. Each of the male characters in The Cold Dark Heart of the World is flawed. Are their flaws of a kind with the evilthat exists as Fidget? Using conventions of the horror novel, the story is an examination of the nature of violence and leaves the reader with a question: Is Ben Calloway a hero, or is he a fool?

THE SERPENT AND THE HUMMINGBIRD tells of men and women who find themselves brought together as they seek common ground in a world close to our own, but bizarre enough to approach the grotesque that Flannery O'Connor said was necessary to shock readers into a realization of the misshapen nature of our times. Faith and the patterns of belief and practice that grow from faith can distort our lives or help us find order in a world of chaos. Sometimes they do both. THE SERPENT AND THE HUMMINGBIRD takes the reader into precarious border lands where faith and chaos can seem indistinguishable. All the novel's central characters struggle with matters of faith, be it in science, religion, hallucinations, or pure reason. Set in Lunsford, Random County, North Carolina a town the mountains of the western part of the state, THE SERPENT AND THE HUMMINGBIRD tells the story of six people, women and men whose lives become entwined in a complex mixture of love, fear, and violence, culminating in a ritual during which people handle deadly serpents as an expression of religious beliefs based on their interpretation of biblical passages. THE SERPENT AND THE HUMMINGBIRD was described in the Tennessee Library Journal as an insightful and sensitive depiction of serpent handling believers. The explosive culminating scenes Edd Guy's church are astonishing descriptions of the bizarre ends to which true believers can be driven.

Storms: Tales of Irmariageddon is the final novel in Wilson Roberts' St. John trilogy. Set on St. John, the smallest and least developed of the three main United States Virgin Islands, just prior to and during the 2017 hurricanes, Irma and Maria, Storms tells of the havoc wrought upon the island and its people as the two hurricanes ripped through the Caribbean with fearsome winds and tides, leaving shattered homes, businesses and lives in their wake. Storms is a novel for everyone who loves St. John; for everyone who knows someone who loves St. John; for everyone who understands what it means to love their community. Storms is a novel for everyone who understands that a beloved community cannot be allowed to perish, whether as a result of greed, ignorance, wind, fire or rain.Each novel in Wilson Roberts' trilogy is a stand-alone tale. Major characters in one book are often part of the background in subsequent books. The first, Murder in Coral Bay, introduces readers to the island of St. John, a Caribbean jewel in the United States Virgin Islands, where Roberts and his wife, Diane Esser, had a home for thirty years. In the wake of a murder, a few of the courageous and honest officers' struggle against their corrupt police department as they attempt to bring a murderer to justice.It Happened on St. John, the second novel in the St. John trilogy, is a love letter to the island, in which the community unites to fight the schemes of two con-artists and their fraudulent, extravagant plan to develop a marina that, if it were ever to be built, would threaten the island's natural and social ecology, as well as its economy. It is the story of a community of trades people, musicians, artists, business owners, artisans; a community in which people put aside small differences to help one another in the face of adversity.Like Wilson Roberts' three previous Caribbean novels, February Heat, Caribbean Ice and October Fury, which were set on the fictional British island of St. Ursula, the St. John trilogy presents fully realized characters living in fully realized places. Their lives and loves, their struggles and victories, their grounding in the communities in which they live will remain with readers long after they have closed the books on the final pages.In addition to Storms: Tales of Irmariageddon, Wilder Publications has published thirteen novels by Wilson Roberts and a book of poetry, Before the Storm and Other Poems.

With few exceptions, all the poems in the first section of this collection were written between 2015 and 2017. Those in the second section are mostly from earlier periods. With one obvious exception, the final section is made up of poems written in March, 2018. All were written under the spell of the muse pictured within. May she inspire me forever.

With few exceptions, all the poems in the first section of this collection were written between 2015 and 2017. Those in the second section are mostly from earlier periods. With one obvious exception, the final section is made up of poems written in March, 2018. All were written under the spell of the muse pictured within. May she inspire me forever.

As Anna Delinny, a central character in A Place in Paradise says, "There are places of power on the earth. Some of great import to the entire world, others of local interest. Talk to someone who has been to Delphi. Ask what kinds of feelings the place engenders. Or Stonehenge. In such places the sense of power is so strong people regard it as evidence of the holy. In other places, the reaction might lead to less pretentious classifications. Perhaps some would call them haunted, or magic." Langeberg, the dark and terrifying ruins of a St. John plantation is such a place, harboring a malevolent power that Anna and her brother Martin have inherited from their grandfather the responsibility for keeping in balance with the rest of the lovely Caribbean island. When the ruins are developed into a luxury resort Anna is forced to confront the balances of her own life. Torn between her academic life in California and dreams of a Nobel in economics and Martin's dedication to the traditional patterns of belief with which they were both raised, she must decide whether evil is real and must be confronted or if it is a nothing more than a word for human over-reaction to unfathomable events. A Place in Paradise is a tale of the present interspersed with episodes from the past, beginning with the brutal French attack led by Henri Longueville on the enslaved Africans of St. John, who 1733 staged one of the first rebellions against slave owners in North American, to the coming of the human flesh eating Caribs, and ending with the arrival on the island of the Taino, who first settled it. All have reason to fear the place that will become Langeberg, an area in which inexplicable evil resides. A Place in Paradise is filled with richly drawn characters, from Anna and Martin to Hank Longe, who first built Langeberg into the Windmill Inn, to his successors Ed and Claudia Langhorne, and Olga Cohen, the Realtor who masterminds the development of Langeberg. It is a story that will keep its readers awake as they listen to the sounds of wild donkeys crying in the night.

Set in the early 1980s, a time when air travel was uncomplicated, when people still smoked in offices, restaurants and bars, October Fury is the final novel in the St. Ursula trilogy, featuring Frank James, poet and private detective. St. Ursula is a British Caribbean island very near to the American and British Virgin Islands. Herbie Lewis, a local bar musician asks Frank to investigate the death of his brother, Jeff.

It is the early 1980s, a time when air travel was uncomplicated, when people still smoked in offices, restaurants and bars. Caribbean Ice, set on St. Ursula, a British Caribbean island very near to the American and British Virgin Islands, is the second novel in a trilogy featuring Frank James, poet and private detective. Until being indicted, Bailey Vandeventer ran the Back Bay Escort Service providing sexual services to a high end clientele that included leading politicians, business men and opinion makers. When the Boston Globe ran an article claiming that Bailey had notebooks detailing her clients' identities and sexual preferences she takes refuge on St. Ursula, staying with her college roommate, Vivian Parker, the wife of St. Ursula's Prime Minister, L. Arthur Parker. Parker tells Frank that if he wishes to remain on St. Ursula he will protect Bailey from the people who are seeking her notebooks and wish to silence her. When Bailey is kidnapped Frank, Chance and their friend, Vinnie Ledford, a retired SEAL set out to rescue her.

Anyone interested in the 1960s will be fascinated by the lives of Brud and Reggie Hicks, the brothers from Texas, their wives Gwendolyn Adams and Gwendolyn James, both members of historically prominent Boston area families, Sam Davis, the defrocked Methodist minister who joins them at Walden Brook, Leo Dennison, a local gun dealer and Keetsville native who is a former selectman, and Stacy Phelps, owner of the Keetsville general store. Brud, his wife, Gwennie, and Sam are hired to teach at Graham Community College, under the leadership of its president Colonel Walter Chapman Lewis, USMC, Ret., while Reggie pursues the outlaw ways that resulted in his being booted out of the Army after serving time in a military stockade in Germany. Leo rants against change, especially what he calls "that damned innersnake highway and them community colleges in Greenfield and Holyoke and Springfield, to say nothing of right here in Graham, and all them beatniks and Communists, and...all them other outsiders that will ride that damned road right into God's country here." All That Endures is a portrait of a world in transition, one that inevitably leads to today's troubled world. The novel will stir memories of those who lived through the times it recaptures. It recreates for those who came later an exciting, challenging, dangerous and often hilarious era in American life.

Born in Philadelphia's Walnut Street Theater in 1849, George Berrell died in 1933, after a life he often described as one of growing up with the country. His travels of self-discovery and those of his life on the stage are illustrative of a nation moving from travel on foot and horseback to that of automobiles and Boeings first major airliner, the 247. Berrell saw it all and performed on stages in early Deadwood to St. Louis and Chicago and all points in between.

Murder disrupts the calm of Coral Bay on St. John in the United States Virgin Islands. One of the world's most unique communities, it is a place where many people are known by nicknames, their birth names often buried in life histories some-such as the woman known only as X-would rather forget. Robert Palmer, once a husband, father and physician from the hills of Western Massachusetts, staggered by the sudden breakup of his marriage, finds work as a bartender at Dante's Landing, a restaurant and bar at the edge of the water. The Landing is a haven for many of Coral Bay's inhabitants and Robert is quickly accepted as one of them. On his first day at the Landing he is befriended by Bethany Wren, whose rosy image veils a troubled and troubling past. The murder of a loud and abusive tourist outside Dante's Landing is the first of three violent deaths. A corrupt police sergeant investigating the murders is as much a threat as the unknown murderer to the peace of Coral Bay, a laughing, singing, dancing, drinking, hard-working, sailing, swimming, fishing, eating and loving corner of St. John. Murder in Coral Bay is the story of how Robert, native St. Johnian Moonie, and Dante, owner of the Landing, find the murderer despite the ineptness and corruption of members of the Virgin Islands Police Department. Rich in descriptions of character and place, readers who know Coral Bay will find that Murder in Coral Bay will remind them of why they love this rare and lovely community. Readers who have yet to visit will find themselves drawn to discover it on their own. Wilson Roberts has published six previous novels with Wilder Publications. The Cold Dark Heart of the World; Incident on Tuckerman Court; The Serpent and the Hummingbird; Borrowed Trouble; Poet's Seat, and All That Endures.