We Died at Such a Place

We Died at Such a Place chronicles the artistic struggles of the brilliant and affectedly afflicted H. Godfrey Byles as he transitions into young adulthood. The reader (and the narrator) follow him as he seeks to navigate the milieu of religious ideas, social pressures, and personal despondency which threaten to chain him to conformity. Set in the sometimes mild, though often stormy forests of the Puget Sound, the raw geography of rural life in the Pacific Northwest exposes beauty, danger and sublimity. Grief, anger and doubt mix together in his turbulent year before college, culminating in his search for meaning outside his family home. Caught between Rachel, who loves him but whom he cannot view as more than a dear friend, and Ned, to whom he is attracted but cannot have, H. Godfrey Byles is driven to desperate actions before he is able to cast aside his many layers of illusion. This enlightenment comes at the price of the narrator's safe authorial distance, a move which undermines the unconscious distance between author and subject, coming narrowly close to the fundamental narrative that all humans construct for themselves. It offers moments of hilarity and poignancy and leads readers to reflect on the attitudes and actions which have shaped their own fictional selves. We Died at Such a Place lends an ironic voice to those attempting to generalize and categorize in a society where definition and meaning battle over the fragments of consciousness like successive waves over sand. The result will surprise you.