Coming soon, the first novel from Scott Reed. A must read story that will leave you breathless and challenge everything you thought you knew.
He had everything most people would consider worthwhile yet there was a gnawing feeling of nothingness inside the mind and soul of Brian Jefferson.
A dark tale of one man’s philosophical journey, MIDDLE OF NOTHING begins with Brian Jefferson on a brief excursion of rediscovery. Originally intending to drive from Seattle to the Oregon Coast, he finds himself wandering into Idaho.
After spending his first night in Idaho with a prostitute, he discovers a darker side of his personality and devolves into levels of sexual depravity that disturb his core self, yet he cannot seem to escape.. Told without the necessity for excessive graphic detail, his adventures create a deepening moral divide within his mind. While attempting to avoid too many graphic depictions, the reality is that the character falls into sexual compulsions that begin to define him.
Looking to escape, he goes north to a small lake to spend a few days and finds his mind further fueled by compulsion. He returns to Seattle and devolves into the indifferent sexual compulsive.
As he continues to strive for a better understanding of his own history and how to escape that which he has become, he learns some disturbing things about nearly everyone he comes in contact with as well as dark family secrets that threaten to destroy him. He has great work, but struggles with the demons in his personal life; demons that seem to grow and deepen as he learns more.
Along the way he will marry once, thinking she is the difference that will turn him, only to find out that his compulsions have fueled her own devolvement.
Through the morass of darkness that envelops his mind, he senses a light and continues to strive forward. A philosophical journey that tells the tale of a modern American man obsessed with those things he believes are normal, money, power and sex, along the path he learns more about himself than he could have hoped.
He travels the world in search of his soul and finds it in the most remarkably unremarkable place. There are people who guide his journey at times, but it is the uniqueness of one family that creates a new path. He meets a secondary protagonist about halfway through the book and she will be one of a few people who truly see a different side of the man; a side that they want to nurture.
The story, told in a sweeping sense over the course of many years uses great detail interspersed with logic, conversation and intense interludes of his own depravity all weaved together to create a new person at the end of the journey. Much of this journey challenges many of our closely held beliefs about everything from sex to love, money, career and society in general.
In the end, the story actually encompasses over thirty years of his life, but the ending is not one that is expected and brings an unexpected feeling.