In The Wake Of Golgotha – Daniel Grace (1)

Mr. Bloomer had not been referred to by his given birth name for close to twenty years. In fact, it was debatable if Arthur even remembered what his last name, Bloomer, was. He had his place in the universe staked out: on the unforgiving cold concrete corner of Ninety- Seventh and Lexington. Life had dealt Mr. Bloomer a hard hand, and he had cashed in and counted his losses ages ago.

Arthur’s deck currently consisted of a mat of moldy cardboard and a dirty, upended 1979 New York Mets (a decade after they were Amazin’) baseball cap that held a collection of discarded loose change and a few crumpled dollar bills. Arthur Bloomer had been rechristened “Smokey” by the streets years ago to a name reflective of his character, akin to Native Americans embracing evocative elements of nature to reflect the spirit and name the person.

Where there was smoke, there was fire; the burning ash of hash, the spoon melting of heroin, and the foiled exhaust of crack cocaine. Arthur’s distant relatives had once stood council in one of the seven Sioux Nations in the Wahpekute (“Shooters Among the Trees”) tribe of the Dakotas, and his great-great-great-grandfather was a Santee Dakota–born Ohíye S’a who died Charles Eastman.

The ancestor who, in between the names Ohíye and Charles, would be educated at Dartmouth and med- schooled at BU would open thirty-two Native American chapters of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), and would cofound the Boy Scouts of America one hundred years before Arthur Bloomer scouted his first fix. Ohíye S’a in Dakota dialect means “always wins.” In English, Charles Eastman doesn’t mean anything, except his past. Arthur Bloomer didn’t mean much either, and his past had passed as addiction, annihilating his future.

The former faint Dakota Sioux and current fainted Shooter Among the Trees, Arthur’s beaten body was now inhabited by an opioid banshee who sought a sole purpose: heat. Suffocating smoke and smoldering fire. There Smokey (as christened by the crack pipe, not the peace pipe) sat, pupils hazy, mumbling something about “Puttin’ out the fire.” Like aerodynamics, the same principles of extreme heights and thermal gradients exist in opioidynamics.

“Daniel Grace’s debut novel is revelatory, both in substance and in style. In the Wake of Golgotha presents lyrical excellence with a compelling reflection on some of our most abiding humanistic and spiritual themes. This is an extremely rare balance, and so Grace’s work is not a light or casual read. It demands attention, and rewards that attention with provocative, elegant writing that lingers well beyond the final page. Grace has written a work that does honor to any bookshelf, and, in so doing, has announced himself as a new literary voice.”

—GREG FIELDS, author of The Bright Freight of Memory, winner of the 2024 American Writing Award for Literary Fiction and Chrysalis/BREW Book of the Year “A fever dream that grips you and won’t let go, the story hovers above the page, pulling you into its seductive spell in Grace’s wildly imaginative meditation on guilt and forgiveness. The book examines notions of guilt, accountability and, ultimately, release from human anguish through the historical figures of Judas Iscariot and Pontius Pilate.

Grace’s prose is musical and rich, befitting colorfully rendered characters who are caught in a moral limbo they themselves do not fully understand. Grace is a painterly writer, immersing the reader in a swirling milieu in which Judas Iscariot and Pontius Pilate exist in multiple timelines. Grace has sympathy and compassion for characters, which, at a glance, deserve neither. But that is what makes the book, even in its fevered tone, grounded and relatable.

This is a hypnotic and transformative work . . .” —ALFREDO BOTELLO, author of 180 Days: Infidelity. Architecture. Punk Rock. Clonazepam. and Spin Cycle: Notes from a Reluctant Caregiver “Grace’s astonishing literary debut takes the most epic tale in history and transforms it into a dark, modern, cinematic thriller with language so addictive the reader can’t turn away, remaining absorbed in Grace’s tormented world long after the story reaches its indelible end.” —GIANNA TOBONI, Emmy-award winning author of The Volunteer: The Failure of the Death Penalty in America and One Inmate’s Quest to Die with Dignity “Daniel Grace delivers a narrative with density and depth, challenging our ability to discern complex truths amid faith, doubt, and the courage to take responsibility for our own mistakes, even ones that echo across millennia.

Through Judas’s voice, Grace challenges everything we thought we knew: “What if betrayal is doing exactly what you’re told, when every instinct screams to refuse?” —K. M. COOKIE, author of Song of Hummingbird Highway “Daniel Grace’s debut novel is a powerhouse debut . . . A bold, ambitious, sprawling epic of literary fiction . . . Grace establishes a sense of timeless terror from the very first page . . .

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 474bdeb02d2e12a6
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 2,738,204 bytes (2.611 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 9798888248959
• Pages: 414
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 558.97 minutes
• Total Words: 111,793
• Total Characters: 646,806
• Average Words per Page: 270.03
• Average Characters per Page: 1562.33

Most Frequent Words

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