The Ripe Blade

Obsessed with death, blood, and all sorts of dark things, especially as an eyewitness to a gorey suicide when he was only a child, Adrian couldn't shake his sinister thoughts as he matured into a man. Despite adopting a nonviolent lifestyle, he was drawn to images of death, real-life crime shows, and even books about cannibalism, serial killings, and necrophilia. Because of his lifelong fixations on the macabre, society labeled him a danger from the first moments he could crawl. As a young adult in college, he found himself stuck in an oppressive relationship with a jealous woman, but his heart was for another, his former babysitter, who was eleven years his senior. When Gretchen reciprocated his love, she and Adrian moved from their home state of Virginia to New Orleans, Louisiana, where vice, sin, and violent impulses plague the man. Suddenly, he's arrested for a brutal murder he did not commit, and his idyllic party life is stripped from him. He tries to put the pieces back together when he's released from jail, but he cannot recreate his old life from the ashes of the past. is a story of the inevitable transformations and transitions plaguing us all. What happens to Adrian within these pages could've happened to anyone. And they have happened to many of us. Let us hope that few will find themselves in similar circumstances. Death will take us all one day. Until then, we are at life's mercy.