Forever After by Gilbert M. Stack

The following book isn't truly a Christmas story, but a significant part of the action happens around Christmas time, so I'm going to spotlight one of my books this Christmas season.

 

Forever After by Gilbert M. Stack

I find that great inspiration for novels often results from the convergence of multiple ideas that come together to form one very exciting and emotionally powerful book. That’s what happened for me when I wrote Forever After. I’d been playing with several plot ideas that were bouncing around in my head for years and one morning as I walked from the train to work, I realized how two of these notions could be blended to form a truly wonderful story.

 

First, there’s the issue of true love in a paranormal setting. I wanted to write about a man who came back from the grave—not to save his wife’s life from terrible danger (I think we’ve seen that plot a few times) but to simply get to continue being with her. To spice it up a bit, she not only doesn’t recognize her husband (because he is dead after all) but she has every reason to despise the person he appears to be. Could my hero use what he knew about his one true love to win her back again?

 

Second, I’d been thinking of a plot that might have worked for Batman. “Bruce Wayne” loses his memory and has to fake it through his life so no one finds out and puts him in an insane asylum. Except, I didn’t want to write about Batman and deal with a bunch of supervillains. I wanted to write about Bruce Wayne trying to do the right thing and save the company that he had driven into the ground through mismanagement (because he spends all of his time being Batman).

 

So, why not combine the two ideas? My hero, Paul Steele, dies in a selfless act of bravery right after a terrible and pretty senseless fight with his wife. He dies thinking she believes he regrets marrying her. But for reasons you’ll have to read the book to find out, he doesn’t go to the afterlife. Instead, he wakes up in the body of Griffin Knight—a billionaire screwup who has just about wrecked everything his parents and grandparents left him. Not realizing what has happened to him, Paul races home worried that his wife, Charlotte, will be both worried and furious at him and runs into his own wake. Naturally, claiming to be the dead man does not make a favorable impression and Paul has to take a really hard look at his life—at both of his lives—and figure out how he’s going to make things right again not only for his own family but for Griffin’s thousands of employees. In doing so, he figures out that he’s not the man he always imagined himself to be.

 

This is a story of love and growth and redemption and love again as Paul seeks to discover if he and Charlotte can have their Forever After right here on earth. I think you will agree that it is a journey well worth taking with them.