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The Inverted Forest
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In the middle of the night, Schuller Kindermann, aged owner and manager of Kindermann Forest Summer Camp in the Ozarks, comes upon his counselors engaged in a naked swim party in the camp’s pool. Outraged, Kindermann fires them all and is forced to hire an entirely new staff in two days before the first group of campers arrive.
One of the new counselors is Wyatt Huddy, a tentative young man with a facial deformity caused by Apert syndrome that has been living in a Salvation Army facility.
Along with the other counselors, Wyatt expects to care for children. To their astonishment they learn that for the first two weeks of camp they will be caring for 104 severely developmentally disabled adults, all of them wards of the state. For Wyatt it is a dilemma that turns his world inside out. Physically, he is indistinguishable from the campers. Inwardly, he would like to believe he is not of their tribe.
Soon Wyatt is called upon to prevent a terrible tragedy. In doing so, he commits an act whose repercussions will alter his own life and the lives of the other Kindermann Forest staff members for years to come.
Q: The characters in the book felt well-honed and authentic. Were some of them easier to create than o thers?
A: They were all tricky to write in their own particular way. Odd as it may seem, Harriet Foster is the character I have most in common with. She’s well intentioned but unsure, qualities that define me, especially as a young man. Kindermann was the most fun and in some ways the easiest to write. He’s such a prissy, judgmental, foolish man- a real case of arrested development. I’m much more fond of him than I should be.
From the author of Heaven Lake, John Dalton. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.