Querying

Shane is currently querying his debut novel, The Danger Is to the Body and It Can Kill.

The novel was a finalist for the 2025 Big Moose Prize from Black Lawrence Press and was longlisted for the C&R Press 2024 Fiction Award. The full manuscript is available upon request.

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Your ancestors built a hideous machine.
Your labor feeds it to this day.
What will you do?

As Laurence clears animal carcasses from New England wilderness blighted by a mysterious industrial disaster, he dreams of a fire that will set everything right. This stolen land has become a window into a possible future. Beached whales decompose on the sand. Lifeless oaks serve as tombstones for everything their branches once sheltered. Indigent workers pick through the wastes like scavengers. Over it all looms the machine, a bloated amalgam of parts and ideas that took root when colonizers first staked their bloody claim to these shores and has been growing ever since. It is this miscreation that Laurence will burn, driven by a childish ember of revolution that has sent him careening away from everything he knows. Walking alongside him are a devout elder who clutches her name like a terrible secret, a young woman who wishes to bargain with the machine, and a lost dog who may not be what she seems. Wrestling with hope, rage, and responsibility in the face of the decomposing world their forebears left them, these guilty souls strive to light a new path forward. Theirs will be a journey deep into America’s angry soil, down to the jagged bones buried beneath.

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