The Devils That Haunt You

by Rick Hoffman

Evan Prendergast is an acclaimed playwright and a bourbon aficionado. Since one man’s aficionado is another man’s heavy drinker, Evan’s hobby has been known to get him into trouble. His affair with Diana Calán, a married colleague, is the starting point for a tumultuous year that sees him humiliating himself on television, alienating the theatre community that has so recently celebrated him, and putting his career in jeopardy. He sets out to redeem himself, prompted by the haunting image of a decaying grave marker, an obscure painting at the Met, and a medieval-style castle in the middle of the Hudson River. Otto Stauffer is an Austrian immigrant who comes to the U.S. in the early 1900s. He works as the building foreman and warehouse supervisor for Frank Bannerman, an eccentric businessman who has erected a castle on the Hudson Valley’s Pollepel Island to house his stock of military collectibles. Otto tries to raise a family in his adopted country, but when The Great War breaks out in Europe, he finds his freedom threatened at the hands of an American government that is distrustful of immigrants from Central Powers nations. Faced with the choice of betraying his friend and employer or risking his family’s security, Otto must make the hardest decision of his life. The lives of these two men—unknown to each other and separated by a hundred years—overlap in the most unsettling way in this first novel by Rick Hoffman. As the dual narrative unfolds, Evan and Otto come to realize that even when a man seeks to right his wrongs, sometimes the devils that haunt you never grow weary.

254 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 1, 2016

About the author

Rick Hoffman is the author of the novels A Long Way Down (2024), Seven-Sided Son of a Bitch (2022), and The Devils That Haunt You (2016), as well as the short story collection The Broken Places (2019) and a fully annotated edition of The Great Gatsby for students and teachers (2023). He was born in Pennsylvania, raised in Mississippi and Louisiana, and he currently lives in New York, where he teaches English and mythology at a nationally recognized Blue Ribbon high school. His fiction has appeared various print and online publications, and he was a 2017 Best of the Net nominee for his short story “Biyanî,” about a Yazidi woman fleeing genocide in Northern Iraq.
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