The Helper

The Helper  is a tale that combines contemporary, speculative fiction with an ambiguous spirituality.  The book explores relationships between lovers, friends, families, and what Powers of Good there may be. 

It’s the story of John Sloan, a Marine Corps Veteran with a life-long secret that is haunting him.  John is a conduit to a healing light that draws him to people on the brink of emotional disintegration, people who are then healed and Helped by this light.  His blue-collar world is shattered when he finds that his connection to this anonymous portal has vanished.  He is alone, seemingly beyond aid, and in desperate need of a Helping himself.
 

The book tracks the intersecting lives of John and two other Helpers.  His lifelong friend Dusty Hakalla is a mixed-blood Ojibwe with a secret of his own.  His power to Help is remarkable, but was once destructively misused.  A career Marine, his scarred childhood and momentary abuse of power have left him jaded and bereft.  Deena Morrison, also a Helper, is John's girlfriend.  Adopted as an infant, she flees John to find her birth-mother, while carrying within herself her own secret.  Another character shadows their lives as narrator, Nan’b’oozoo, the trickster god of Ojibwe legend—at times sarcastic and petulant, at others insightful and humorous. 

The novel travels from the gritty Lake Superior port-cities and Indian Reservations of northern Wisconsin to the Jewish neighborhoods of North Miami Beach, Florida—from Parris Island to the war zones of Kuwait and Afghanistan.