Young boys in a small Midwestern blue-collar suburb spend long summer days exploring the natural wonders in a small field where the town sewer spills into a tiny brook. When one day they spy a gigantic frog five times the size of the small green reptiles they’re accustomed to targeting with their BB guns, he becomes Read More …
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On readers of audiobooks
I read a lot of books as audiobooks. There is an inherent danger, for want of a better word, in that, because it is all but impossible to find a reader whose tones and inflections permit you to interpret the words and phrases of the author and appreciate his or her prose style in the Read More …
The Unforgiving Hand
For the ephemera of Kuntz’s Pond, the excitement of a sunrise can be the highlight of a life. But a tragic encounter in a mysterious cave teaches them lessons about the uncertainties and brevity of life. Their story, excerpted here, is one of a diverse collection of tales in Faith of a Father and Other Stories, available in e-book Read More …
The Famous Gunfighter
A famous gunfighter sits at a bar on a hot afternoon in the middle of Kansas. He reflects silently on a life that has punished him with everything he wished for. Now, he wants company, and he wants to be left alone. He wants silence, and he wants someone to talk to. But not particularly the Read More …
Services for Hamilton Pope
Hamilton Pope cast a big shadow in a small town — and in the life of a Guthville, Illinois, expatriate who followed his career goals to a Chicago suburb. When Pope dies, his funeral at a small Baptist church gives the man an opportunity at midlife to reflect on the nature of family, community, friendship and more. The narrative is Read More …
Covering championship euphoria to the utmost
Go, gulp, Cubs! Heh. Heh. That’s not easy for me, as a White Sox fan, to say. I still consider one of my chief failings as a parent to be that I raised three Cubs fans. One does wish, after all, to shelter one’s children from a lifetime of heartache and disappointment. But there it Read More …
Fox Lake cop’s killing and government’s balance sheet
Two very different stories this week have me thinking about the cost of government and what people should know about it. Read column
The Milkhouse
A teenage boy watches as his grandfather systematically levels an old cinder-block milkhouse that had stood for years about 50 yards from the Garden Prairie, Illinois, farmhouse where the boy has come to live after the murders of his parents in Chicago. His grandfather has been promising to tear down the old building for years. Read More …
Welcome
Welcome to jimslusher.com.I launched this website to promote my creative writing and find a place to store material I’ve written over the years where someone might chance upon it while wandering the vast forest of the Internet. My literary legacy may be slight, but to the degree possible in what remaining years I have, I want Read More …