From Michael Gurian:  If I am known at all, it is probably for The Wonder of Boys, The Wonder of Girls, or another nonfiction work in the fields of education or psychology. If you have read any of this work in applied neuroscience and psychology—or even my less known novels and poetry–you will know of my hopefulness about human nature, but also my vigilance against its dark side.

I started writing The Stone Boys, my newest novel (Latah Books, 2019) in college four decades ago, feeling certain of only one thing—that I wanted to write it in a voice and style that not only adults but also adolescents would appreciate.  It has taken me this long to complete and publish this book not only because the voice and story needed extreme care, but also because my own emotional responses kept rising and falling with memories as I wrote.  For insisting I publish, and helping me do so, I want to thank Jon Gosch, Executive Editor of Latah Books, and his publishing team, Logan Amstadter, Susan Amstadter, Brandon Krebs, and Russ Davis.  I want to also thank Printz Honor Author Terry Trueman for his support as well as my family, Gail, Gabrielle, and Davita.

Some of this book is autobiographical.  At ten, like Ben, I was molested by my psychiatrist.

Ben’s story is almost exactly mine, as is Ben’s escape, though my escape happened a bit earlier than Ben’s.  Gail, my wife, did a Google search recently and discovered that my psychiatrist was later prosecuted and incarcerated for crimes against other boys, and two years ago, facing new prosecution and prison time, shot himself.  Reading that news report, I felt no elation, nor did I feel satisfaction; I felt a combination of righteous moral justice and deep sympathy for all the invisible and damaged boys in our culture.

That doctor, I believe, was “Dave McConnell,” the other boy in my novel, formed and shaped as a child into an evil man.  While most of my empathy will always go towards victims, I am glad I had enough empathy for the innocent boy in Dave and my doctor so that I could write this character effectively.  Evil never begins in a vacuum.  There is no more dangerous man than the one who has felt, for many years of boyhood trauma, that he is powerless.  This is why powerlessness sits at the heart of what goes wrong in males.

Although my molestation was not like Dave’s—not severe enough to re-wire my brain to pedophilia—its trauma placed me in a tribe of millions of boys and girls who have been specifically targeted by brutal peers or dominant adults for dangerously inappropriate sexual contact, whether sexual abuse, sexual harassment, sex trafficking, or sexual bullying.  Like me, this global tribe of children fear life itself during adolescence, after our abusers tend to abandon us.  Hopefully, as I did, everyone in this tribe will seek therapy and support to heal.  I became a mental health counselor in part because I began therapy at 16 and over the decades saw the gift of that profession.  The human struggle to combat evil can take place as much in a therapy office as a battlefield, since all great human battles actually begin inside us.  I won my struggle with evil, but Dave McConnell did not.

In initial drafts of The Stone Boys, I wrote even more graphic scenes of sexual violence than you will read in the published book.  Most of those brutal scenes were deleted for the sake of safe publication—especially so that school libraries, classrooms, and young adults could use the book.  Even so, you might find parts of the book disturbing, especially if you have read my other books, such as The Wonder of Boys or The Wonder of Girls.

But I decided to retain some scenes of violence, e.g. of the bullying at the lagoon in the book’s beginning, because the story absolutely needed them.  Childhood trauma needs honesty—not gratuitousness, of course, but honesty.  Nearly every day we hear in the news about another boy, girl, woman or man who is being or has been molested, harassed, abused, trafficked, or battered, yet a newspaper or social media post cannot fully tell the individual’s story, especially when sex is involved.  A book, however, can move into every realm, and must do so.

For boys and men, this is true in a male-specific way.  While all human beings live in a constant internal search for a self, males have fewer internal guideposts than females; young males take huge adolescent and young adult risks in some part to discover a self reflected in the world in which they perform and grow.  The normal confusion of being a boy in our new millennium is amplified tenfold when the boy is battered, from early on, by trauma perpetrated on him by other men.

Boys need us today in many of the same ways they have always needed us and in some new ways, too, that we have barely begun to comprehend.  At some point soon, we will need to have a “Decade of the Boy” in which our civilization completely regroups to see what is happening to males all around us.  Until then, I hope The Stone Boys will inspire you to discover two boys who are, like every boy around us, trying to make sense of a difficult life as they strive to become good men.

To get the book, please visit www.michaelgurian.com, amazon.com, or other online or brick-and-mortar bookstores.  Here is the link on amazon.com: https://amzn.to/2nlkkBH

Thank you,

Michael Gurian

This blog post is adapted/excerpted from the Afterword to The Stone Boys.