Inferno Inside
63,230 words.
Book Synopsis
Controlled by his devotion to his mother’s memory, yet impelled by progressively worsening paranoia, fifty-one year old Lawrence seeks to avenge what he believes to be a covert tactic by the nearby fibreglass plant to drive him off the family property – a plot that he believes to have caused his mother’s death. When a series of events occur against him, he engages in a strategy of retaliation that involves the local police, intent upon exacting revenge on the police and the factory.
But Lawrence battles more than the paranoia and obsessive devotion to his deceased mother. He intercedes in an assault on a young woman, and must deal with his perception of the morality of a relationship with the girl. He struggles against conflicting emotions and beliefs about the local townspeople. They are beliefs driven by his mother’s view of a village set against them, versus the reality of the townspeople’s acceptance of him. His confrontations with the former boyfriend of the young woman cause difficulties for Lawrence on several fronts, and trigger both regression and progression in his psychological growth.
Compounding his struggle to honour his mother, psychiatrist Bruce Wilkinson becomes a trusted confidant for Lawrence, and a source of emotional conflict, as Wilkinson steers him toward a more reasoned approach to his interactions. When Lawrence chooses to forego the psychiatrist’s and his female friend’s advice, retreating to a pathological dedication to his mother, he excavates her burial plot and brings the cremation urn home, placing it in a shrine that he has constructed of her old belongings.
A crisis at the neighbouring fibreglass factory forces Lawrence to make an instantaneous choice that will have dire consequences for him, and will result in a catastrophic change in his life.
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