ABOUT THE BOOK

 

Ceremony of Fire grew out of a specific period of my life: a time when I worked inside a Salvation Army rehabilitation center. I operated the Crusher—the huge machine that compacted and destroyed what couldn't be sold or reused.

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We crushed everything: clothes, shoes, toys, furniture… and to my horror, a surprising number of books. I salvaged as many as I could, but still, the most commonly crushed book was the Bible, simply because it's the most widely printed book in the world.

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I even found two of my own children's books headed for the Crusher. Ironically, the one book I never once saw was an AA book.

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That experience stayed with me.

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Watching books, especially sacred ones, become disposable objects made me think deeply about how meaning is created, distorted, and reused by systems much larger than the individuals inside them.

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Avalon in Ceremony of Fire was born from that realization: a society clinging to fractured scripture, half-remembered doctrine, and rituals stripped from their original meaning, until faith becomes a tool of surveillance, purity, and control.

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This novel references religion, but it is not a faith-based story. The other major city in the novel, Redemption City (Red C), has no use for religion—and no time for it either.

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What remains, instead, are people trying to stay human inside systems that demand they be something else.