July 15th, 1918 — Second Battle of the Marne.
Sergeant Samuel Carmichael of the United States Army was weary of soul and bone. He missed Pittsburgh, the shepherd’s pies his mother baked on Sundays, the innocent banter of his doting sister, and more than anything, he yearned for —
“GAS! GAS!” — explosions, shouts, panic. The men cursed and fumbled with their gas masks, save for one: Private Maynard, whose mask was lost in the darkness. In a final act of heroism, Sergeant Carmichael — war-weary but evermore loyal — gives his mask to Private Maynard, and, suffocating to death …
… awakens hours later, alive and inexplicably well.
Almost a hundred years later, his centenarian wife Victoria dies, but he is still a young man. As the anchor to his secret existence dissolves with her last breath, Samuel is an ageless, perhaps immortal, castaway in a world alien to memory. His grip on reality wanes; his soul stirs relentlessly. As the tapestry of the past century unravels, the sergeant is plunged into an odyssey through the shadows of a fracturing psyche and the agonizing questions of his life.
Methuselah is an unflinching gaze into the opera of divine providence, the abyss of true malevolence, and the trials of the Western soul — a soul once bound by faith, wonder, sacrifice, and redemption, convictions now adrift in the same tempest of decay that threatens to drag Samuel Carmichael down to the depths of ruination forever.
I started Methuselah in the Winter of 2018 while discerning for the priesthood. Responsibilities required for such a lifestyle saw an on-again, off-again writing cycle which produced content at such a slow pace that I inevitably shelved the project for good.
The nation came grinding to an unfortunate halt in March of 2020 with the advent of COVID and the ensuing pandemic of fear. Professionally, I paused like most; spiritually, I encountered the most intense period of growth I’d known. An explosion of activity and motion in the interior life, coupled with a temporary freedom from work duties, saw Methuselah’s continuation.
Methuselah is a Catholic novel inasmuch as the author is Catholic; but this is not another genteel Fr. Brown-type novel or one of its derivatives that Catholic authors seem obsessed with producing at a white-knuckle rate. Real life is often gritty and dark, unfair and cruel, a reality captured well within Methuselah’s passages. As such, warnings will be given before each chapter about parts some readers may consider troublesome, but one should expect throughout the entire novel spots of vulgarity, depictions of violence, and “spiritual peril” such as regular encounters with evil and what Catholics would consider moments of demonic influence.
That being said, the novel is well-balanced. Where there is immense darkness, there is light waiting to vanquish it.
One could expect at least one chapter to be released every 4 to 6 weeks on average.
To accommodate Substack’s limited styling options, the following formatting decisions were made:
Paragraphs are not indented;
The few phrases typed in small-caps are instead typed in code-blocks;
Certain sections that are poetry, notes written by characters, etc are aligned to the left margin.
Enjoy the ride.