Tangible Angels - Paperback

by Ien Nivens (Author)

Vanessa Cavendish keeps to herself and minds her shop by the canyon on the outskirts of Keening, Oklahoma. She has but one employee, a gothed-out rebel debutante in fishnets and a ratty tutu. Both women have their secrets to keep. But after hours, when a freak blizzard traps them together in her house, Vanessa learns how deep the troubled waters in Jeannie Ivory run. Jeannie says she invented the adopted son of a prominent Keening family. She claims he isn't real. Claims he terrorizes her. She spins out her bizarre account of Eugene "Sewer Boy" Lamb's unlikely rise from exurban legend to flesh-and-blood angel of polite, evangelical society. Confident, accomplished, and so beguilingly good, Eugene is everything Jeannie Ivory can never be again. Every life he touches he seems to charm, including Vanessa's. But how much goodness can a woman tolerate, when the cost of it is paid in another woman's dignity, sanity, and blood? All Jeannie needs is a witness. All she wants from Vanessa is a little faith. Is that too much to ask? Tangible Angels treads an imaginary line between Magical Realism and American Gothic Horror.

Author Biography

An artist and an educator by training and a seeker by inclination, Ien Nivens grew up on the pentecostal plains of Oklahoma and moved to New England at the age of 23. He lives with his wife Michelle and a cat named Barnaby in a renovated textile mill in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, where he works as a web and graphic design consultant for artists, writers and musicians. His reviews of fiction, art, music and performance appear online at berkshirefinearts.com and artslashlife.com. Mr. Nivens is also the author of The American Book of Changes, a re-interpretation and re-invigoration of the sixty-four hexagrams of the classic Chinese divination system known as the I Ching. Tangible Angels is his first novel. He is currently working on a fantasy novel about a disfigured princess and her portraitist. Connect with Ien on Facebook, Twitter and Goodreads and on his blog at iennivens.com or hang out with him and his writer peeps at specufiction.com. You might also enjoy the digital art available at tangibleangels.com.