You know, for a guy who spent 37 years in advertising, you’d think I’d be better at marketing my own work.
At least until you remember that I was a copywriter who never got that involved in marketing strategy. Tell me what you want the audience to know, I’ll put it in words they can understand and appreciate, and you can decide how that message gets out there. Left to my own devices, the marketing strategy for Hillsboro Publishing is to put out a newsletter and hope for the best.
Also, my marketing budget is in the no figures.
Nevertheless, I’m going to try to do better with The Smalltown Way because I think it has broader appeal than my last two novels. Fluffball! was a satire of professional sports, which is a niche within a niche. Kerouac’s Ghost is more mainstream but maybe the title made it seem like you had to know a lot about Jack Kerouac to enjoy it. I don’t think that’s the case, but what do I know.
Anyway—I’m going to get my press kit done and let bookstores and libraries know I’m available for readings and signings and general conversation. Apparently some writers are reaching readers through a specific subgenre of TikTok called BookTok—I’m going to give it a try. I have a small presence on TikTok (@johnmdonovan, if you’re keeping score) but haven’t really committed to it. I posted a few jokes and observations and got a handful of views, but then when I posted a video of a baby goat jumping on my shoulders, the number of views beat the previous high by 400 percent.
We’ll see if there’s a connection between avid readers and people who like baby goat videos. In the meantime, here’s a look at The Rocheville Devil, published in 2018.
A Little History and What It’s About
Some people prefer to live in the past. This might be a coping mechanism in a world that seems more complex and fast-paced and at times downright nasty compared to the one they grew up in. I can understand it to an extent but I’m not sure it’s healthy, certainly not if you take it to an extreme that keeps you from living a happy life in the present.
That was the spark that led to writing The Rocheville Devil. Tom Skolka is in his early 40s and his life has been one setback after another. Two steps forward, two steps back—and just when he think his luck is changing, a tragedy makes him wonder if he’ll ever find happiness.
But right around that time is when he discovers a new dimension to his childhood memories: He feels as if he’s physically back in that space. He calls these experiences visions, but he feels them deeply—and this gives him an idea. Why stay in a brutal world where everything is stacked against me? Why not return to a place where I can relive these memories without getting in anyone’s way?
In short, he wants to go back to a time and place when he was an innocent person in an innocent world. He makes the journey from New York City to his old hometown of Rocheville, Illinois, with the intention of taking up residence in his old abandoned elementary-school building.
Is this a prudent thing to do? Well, you’ll have to read the book. But eventually one of Tom’s least favorite teachers begins intruding on his visions—and that complicates everything.
The Title
From the time I conceived it, this book was always going to be called The Rocheville Devil.
Main Characters
Tom Skolka, a living example of what happens when bad things happen to good people. In his visions we see that he was a typical kid, a little unlucky at times but always well-meaning. He is happiest when he’s immersed in his visions but even then he begins to doubt that this is a healthy lifestyle.
Carey Bevins, one of Tom’s classmates from Rocheville, now a bank teller and aspiring mystery writer in Colby City. Carey accidentally learns where Tom is and eventually earns his trust enough to learn the story of why he’s doing what he’s doing. She makes it her goal to help Tom readjust to life outside the school building.
Jack Nash, another old friend and classmate, now working for Chuck Kelso at Colby City Lumber. Living in a small town makes it difficult for Jack to reconcile his tough-guy persona with the knowledge that he’s gay, so life isn’t going that well for him either—especially after he loses his job and gets arrested for assaulting his wife. Many years earlier, Tom Skolka was the catalyst for a break in Jack’s relationship with his father—and when he too learns Tom is back he’s torn between reconciliation and revenge.
The Rocheville Devil, an imaginary Bigfoot-type creature for which Rocheville High School took the nickname for its sports teams. The term also refers to the hideous devil illustration at center court of the school gym, and, I don’t know, maybe a literary scholar might someday think that Tom’s childhood memories are a devil that haunts him and leads him to his fate.
Favorite Passages
When Tom arrives at the school he visits each room, sometimes recalling a fond memory, other times going into a full-fledged vision. He has some less than pleasant memories of the principal Mr Hatter:
Into the second floor of the original building: First stop, the principal’s office, just to see if anything interesting or scandalous had been left behind. Nothing obvious. The old wooden desk. A wooden chair. On the chair a dead phone, undoubtedly the one through which Hatter had yelled at him in third grade. None of the notorious paddles remained—Hatter must have taken those home and put them in a trophy case with engraved plates:
Old Betsy. Blistered third-grader’s ass, 1967.
The General. Sent smart-mouth sixth-grader flying, 1969.
Wooden Death. One million tears, 1963-70.
Tom had seen dungeons in domination videos that had nothing on Mr Hatter’s arsenal.
There was another principal during Tom’s first couple of years, a young fellow named Esterhaus, who smiled a lot and seemed to know every kid’s name. He always looked like he was working on something in his head, some grand plan to improve the school, but they transferred him to Colby City after Tom’s first-grade year, and around Rocheville the rumor popped up that the president of the school board had said it was a shame to waste a talented administrator on the likes of those hicks up north. Enter Mr Hatter, a veteran of the Korean War and a sour little bulldog who at age 42 had no intention of developing a rapport with children in such a late stage of his life. The joke around school was that he had wiped out a whole platoon of Red Chinese with one of his paddles, just spanked the Commie hell out of ’em.
The school board refused to approve Hatter’s proposed military-haircut proposal, which turned out in his favor because it helped him discover how much he loved saying “Excuse me, Miss” to long-haired boys. He never understood the spontaneous inventiveness of childhood, never understood a child’s need to express himself in new ways. Fifth grade: Tom remembered Daniela telling him about the previous day at recess when she and some of the girls were making up a new hand jive—the movements, the rhyme, everything—and Hatter approached, listened intently for a bit, and said “Is this something you think you ought to be doing?” She swore it was true and Tom had no reason to doubt it. Mr Hatter didn’t understand children. He was born 42.
Carey Bevins supplements her income with freelance articles for the Spalding’s local history magazine The Red Brick Times, and in her research for a story on the origins of the county school nicknames she learns the truth behind the Rocheville High School Devils—and not only that, she discovered that her grandfather was one who propagated the story back in 1931. I had some fun writing a couple of 1930s-style editorials on the subject:
THE HAZARDS OF IRRATIONAL THINKING by Spec Kelley, Publisher
Are you one of the many who spread the rumor of an eight-foot-tall beast roaming the woods northeast of Rocheville? Are you one who embellished the story, thinking it would build you up in the eyes of others? Are you one who frightened your children with gory tales of the Rocheville Devil and his monstrous appetite?
You should be ashamed for believing this fairy story, but more importantly, you should be ashamed of not keeping your mouth shut and letting it die a silent death. Three more “sightings” have been reported to the sheriff’s office, at least that many more to this newspaper. The town is so abuzz with nervous excitement you’d think President Hoover was coming to town, until you stopped to realize the President has no great need of the crackpot vote. Eight-foot creatures indeed. The Rocheville Devil indeed. It is hardly important who invented this lie, for by passing it along blindly you are just as guilty as if you had made it up yourself.
What does it speak to the rest of the world, that in this era of rapid technological progress, we find in Colby County, Illinois a pocket of superstitious non-thinkers ready to run for the hills at someone’s sad joke about monsters? Stay on your guard for leprechauns and dragons, Rocheville. I think I saw some cavorting along your Main Street.
Interesting indeed. And holy cow, did Spec Kelley hate Rocheville or what? One week later, the answer:
NATIONAL CLAIM TO FAME IS A CLAIM TO SHAME by Spec Kelley, Publisher
Well, this week I’ve had calls from as far away as New York and San Francisco. “What’s going on up in your neck of the woods?” they ask me. “Any new boogeymen to report?” That’s right, readers, the Rocheville Devil story has crossed the country. If there’s anything more we could have done to make Colby County look like a haven for dimbulbs, halfwits, and sheeplike followers of the absurd, I don’t know what it would be.
A newsreel film crew stopped in here this morning looking for directions to the home of the Rocheville Devil. Obviously, they hadn’t heard the news that the whole thing was a hoax concocted by Raymond Griffin, 42, and his son Dick, 18, two entrepreneurs in the manufacturing field—manufacturing bootleg whiskey, that is. Two nights ago, some of the brave young men of Rocheville went searching the woods where the “monster” was sighted, and happened upon the Griffin paterfamilias and his progeny cooking up a batch of their homemade corn squeezin’s. So there’s your Rocheville Devil, everyone. There’s the eight-foot-tall hairy beast you believed in so fervently. A couple of small-time moonshiners made him up, and you ate him up.
But here’s the kicker, folks. Some Rocheville residents think the moonshine story is the false one! Estes Colborn, 18, told this reporter he didn’t care what the Griffins admitted to, he saw the Rocheville Devil plain as day! I’ll let readers ponder whether or not young Estes is one of Rocheville’s intellectual elites.
Here’s another passage from Tom’s initial tour of the school, when he goes into the school kitchen for the first time in his life and realizes how badly kids treated the cafeteria workers:
Tom stepped into the kitchen for the first time in his life and was not all that surprised to find the old ovens and cabinets still there. Yeah, let’s just leave ‘em—who’s gonna want ‘em? He checked all the drawers and found a couple of rolls of aluminum foil, almost empty. No utensils—at least someone had the sense to salvage those. In the back of the kitchen there were two posters: one demonstrating the proper techniques for sanitizing dishes, the other a minimum wage notice from the Department of Labor.
And off to the right, almost hidden in the darkness, a time clock.
He would have bet that not one of his classmates ever thought of the cooks as employees. To us they were servants, existing solely to cook our meals and wash our plates and keep smiling, even in the face of smartass remarks like “What is this, fried puke?” They created meals for 200 kids every day and watched half their work dripping down the sides of the trash cans.
He wondered if any kid ever said Thanks. He wondered if the cooks ever wished they could grab a kid at random and slap him silly as an example to the rest: Are you this ungrateful to your mothers, you little punks?
He wrote his name in dust on the steam table and scanned the cafeteria for more memories. Strange—a thousand lunches here, four items per lunch, and he couldn’t remember ever taking a bite. He remembered laughing hysterically at Jerry Allison’s impression of Mr Hatter eating a Sloppy Joe, and getting hit in the face with a pear thrown by some first-grader two tables away, and sitting next to Daniela—innocently at first, then with girlfriend-stealing intent later. He remembered Miss Bell’s endless repertoire of knock-knock jokes, Mrs Kester’s daily egg salad sandwich from home, and Miss Violet Tarvin casting a pall over every meal. But there wasn’t a single mouthful of food lodged anywhere in his memory.
What Readers Think
Like Trombone Answers, I submitted The Rocheville Devil to the Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards Competition. Unlike Trombone Answers, the judge didn’t seem to get it. He or she got bogged down in the reason for Tom’s visions—saying they were more like “a fugue state,” which had no bearing on Tom’s decision to go live in an abandoned school building.
I also submitted a copy to a book blogger who posted a review despite the fact that she pretty obviously didn’t read it. Good review, and fairly impressive job stretching my blurb out as far as she did.
But The Rocheville Devil does have some legitimate reviews too:
Once again John M Donovan succeeds in taking the reader back to a simpler time…This time Donovan not only captures what was right about the age of innocence, but begins to explore what can go wrong once that innocence is lost. As with his earlier novels, Donovan knows how to draw the reader into the story--I began reading, put it down once, picked it up the next day and read until I was finished. Captivating and creative. I recommend it strongly for anyone's summer reading list.
An intelligent and thought-provoking psycho-drama.
After meeting the author at a local bookstore, I decided to read the story that one reviewer referred to as a spine-tingling thriller. I would categorize it more as a psychodrama. It is the story of a man whose life has fallen apart, and who seeks consolation by returning to the long-forgotten small town elementary school where he felt life last made sense and was good. The story is well written, with interesting characters and intelligent sub-plots. The author has a good understanding of what makes people think and act the way they do, and he uses it to create a world where things happen for reasons, without falling prey to predictability. I was not expecting the ending, but no spoilers here. I recommend reading the book to find out.
When we meet up for coffee bring a copy of Smalltown and one of Keroacs ghost