Black Days a novel

Black  Days  tells the story of Daniel Fassett, a Vermont man who crashes his vehicle into the Mad River on Christmas Eve, 1992. After nearly drowning, Daniel falls into a four-month-long coma shortly before his retirement date, and loses a significant portion of his pension. Depressed and financially strapped, he enlists the aid of a local semi-retired physician, Dr. William Butcher, to help him hibernate through the winter in a homemade casket housed in a backyard maple sugarhouse.??Despite Daniel's attempts to maintain secrecy, word of the procedure eventually gets out -- and that is when trouble begins. From across the country, folks eager to escape their woes reach out to Daniel and Dr. Butcher in hopes of becoming the next to pass a season in oblivion. Large sums of money are offered for the privilege -- but death, deception, and moral and ethical dilemmas that have no clear solutions wreak havoc on Daniel's life.

Jackson Ellis is a writer and editor from Vermont who has also spent time living in Nevada and Montana. His short fiction has appeared in  The Vermont Literary Review,  Sheepshead Review,  Broken Pencil,  The Birmingham Arts Journal,  East Coast Literary Review,  Midwest Literary Magazine, and  The Journal of Microliterature. He co-published VerbicideMagazine.com, which he founded as a print periodical in 1999.  His debut, Lords of St. Thomas, received the 2017 Howard Frank Mosher First Novel Prize.