CURIOSITIES-A NEW YORK SIDESHOW

Curiosities – A New York Sideshow is a psychological suspense novel that probes the very confined world of twenty-year-old Alice Needham, her existence as a paraplegic curiosity, a victim of cruel stares and hurtful whispers, and emotional abuse. She has always looked upon herself with a realistic eye, knowing she is an oddity, an easy target for those watching her struggle to walk. Hers is a pitiless world only understood by targets like herself, by people who know the torment and humiliation of being perceived as an oddity, an aberration...as a freak in a sideshow.
 

Alice's life is almost completely restricted to a subterranean existence in a small basement shop in the East Village of Manhattan. Named Curiosities, this shop is where she manages a failing business selling discarded second-hand items few people want. Bound by heavy metal leg braces and crutches, her view of life is often limited to watching passersby through the shop window, a half-flight below the sidewalk, and the occasional customer who stumbles across her tiny sign.
 

Most everything and everyone within Alice's world is also a peculiarity: Inge, her overly large mother who sells perfume in a 5th Avenue department store; Bruce Needham, her tiny, Napoleonic, insurance-selling father; Moses Drury and Hank Bullard, her loyal, misfit, nerd friends; and, Mrs. McKinstry, an eccentric, elderly neighbor woman who sees Alice as the daughter she lost at birth. 

Even though Alice’s window vantage point is restricted to seeing only the bottom half of people passing on the above sidewalk, Alice is attracted to their unique appearances. With swift artistic skill, she commits these studies to memory as she quickly sketches their likenesses and later selects favorites that she converts to paintings. Her art is her love, which helps shut out the dysfunctional reality of her life.

Alice's claustrophobic world becomes tangled with the hope that a homeless man is a Good Samaritan. Believing he is set on protecting her, Alice sympathizes with the wretched person. She is unwittingly involved in terrifying events that will forever alter her predictable life with a traumatic, unexpected end that will permanently change all involved.

I've always felt that stories primarily in one main location have an intimacy that draws the reader like no other. They have an unimpeded, raw vantage point where extraneous storytelling trappings are scraped away, leaving only naked truth…with no place to hide. Curiosities - A New York Sideshow is such a novel.

Rob Kircher is a consistent 5-Star reviewed psychological suspense author.

Copyright Robert W. Kircher 2024. All rights reserved 

As a writer, I am naturally curious…always wondering why people do what they do. What motivates them to act in certain ways, to think so differently? Is it simply learned behaviors from early development and later influential contacts and situations that arose? Or, in the case of Rosa and Julian Lowenstein, could their actions have been triggered and indelibly instilled before birth?
 

The incredible advancements in medical research suggest that it is entirely plausible for sophisticated intelligence to have existed within Rosa and Julian's fetuses long before the traditionally held twenty-eighth week of pregnancy and the very real plausibility that awareness of each other may have occurred at their moment of conception. Even more astonishing, it is entirely reasonable to think that Rosa and Julian's fetuses had the means to alter selective elements within their predetermined genetic paths through the development of acute telepathic abilities.

Villa Lipari-A Naples Love Story is an intense psychological suspense novel set within the affluent backdrop of Port Royal, Naples, Florida, chronicling Rosa and Julian Lowenstein's extraordinary telepathic powers as fraternal twins and their most unimaginable love-hate relationship. It pries open normalcy and exposes a most competitive underside that entraps their wealthy South American father and his blue-blood trophy wife in their invasive and traumatic psychological battle for survival.

I've always felt that stories primarily in one main location have an intimacy that draws the reader like no other. They have an unimpeded, raw vantage point where extraneous storytelling trappings are scraped away, leaving only naked truth…with no place to hide. Villa Lipari-A Naples Love Story is such a novel. 

Rob Kircher is a consistent 5-Star reviewed psychological suspense author.

Copyright Robert W. Kircher 2024. All rights reserved