Worse Things Than Dying--A Fr John Winter Novel

Have you ever asked yourself, given the chance, how human do you want to remain?

If you had the power, would you end your disabled child’s life, if you could create a better, healthier version? Would you take a loved one from the grave if someone told you they could breathe new life into them? Given the power, how far would you go? This is what Fr John Winter—worse things than dying, sets out to explore

Eugenics zealot and scientist, Dr Eugene Marks, is driven insane by guilt because he blames himself for his disabled daughter’s plight.

Fr John Winter, A Catholic priest, is burnt out from a psychic gift his uncle, Cardinal Andrey Twomey of Philadelphia, tells him is from God. Winter sees it as a curse, not a gift. He has had enough of the Church, all he wants now is to fall into the arms of drink and his new lover, Samantha Clarke.

But then his uncle disappears in Philadelphia and a local journalist from his home town of Athlone cries out to him as he is being murdered.

Fr Winter is a psychological thriller. A cross-genre, thought-provoking sortie into the old world of religion and the supernatural and the new world of genetic engineering which is fuelling resurgent eugenics.

Winter is a near-alcoholic forty-eight-year-old retired catholic priest living in 1980s Athlone. He has been pensioned off due to stress and exhaustion. But it was no ordinary life’s overwork that almost destroyed him. Winter's psychic abilities has led to him quitting his vocation. He signed up to help the living, not to find his nights spent speaking to the tormented souls of the departed.

Back in Athlone where he started out in the 1960s, surviving on the Church's meagre pension, Winter has taken refuge in the Royal Hoey hotel, propping up the bar, drinking pints of black stout and hot whiskeys. Not a bad way, he reckons, to continue.

But then he meets Samantha Clarke and falls into her bed, igniting a sexual and emotional maelstrom within him. She wants him to clean up his act, stop drinking, get a job.

When an old friend, Fr Gallagher, asks him to use his power to help a young man, David Ward, who is tormented by nightmares which have their roots in a terrible deed committed during the Irish land war in 1880’s Mid-Roscommon, in a place well named, Bleakmount, Winter is torn between loyalty to his friend and his own desire not to go back to that life. Two brothers were found dead in a house fire in a cottage named locally as 'the old famine cottage'.

Cardinal Twomey sends him a file detailing his battle with the leading geneticist, Dr Eugene Marks. The file starts, “John, if you’re reading this, I’m probably missing—or dead”.

Marks has a secret Twomey knows nothing of. He has a deformed daughter, Michelle, and the child carries a terrible secret within her tortured body. He is determined to renew her, using his skills as a scientist. But Michelle has embarked on a sexual journey with Marks’s brilliant, but damaged, assistant, Dr Bernard White. White harbours his own secrets which could destroy Marks's plans. And Michelle has her own ideas about what’s normal.

And then there is the reanimated corpse above in the bed that binds them all in a ghastly duty of care.

Winter is flung unwillingly into investigating his uncle’s mysterious disappearance, and helping David Ward.

Meanwhile Marks is driven out of America by Cardinal Twomey and arrives in Athlone (where his family on his father's side originated and where he owns land). He sets up a laboratory in a secret place that legend has is haunted by demons and ridden with disease.

Winter follows him, looking for answers to his uncle's disappearance and his friends death. What he finds is worse than anything he could have imagined and leads him to the terrifying conclusion, there are worse things than dying. A lot worse.