Dangerous Passageways

About the Book

The lead character in the book is a young man named Clark who has difficulties concerning his relationship with his father and friends on the street.  Clarks father and his fathers small smattering of relatives, are the only people he is acquainted with.  They are scattered and irresponsible and unfriendly.  Trapped by crime and greed and poverty, they are very familiar with that lifestyle.  Clark drifts away from his father and into crime.  His friends on the street become more important to him  and he jockeys for power within his own peer group.  At first he goes from friend to friend.  His mother is dead and he cannot seem to live up to his fathers expectations.

Clarks life on the street is pretty defeating.  It is filled with offers of drugs and wine, and he has a friend who has been thrown out of school.  Without the guidance of a mother, he loses track of how many bad things he has done with his peers out on the street.  He makes transitory friendships that are flighty, and begin and end very quickly.  They have incidents that are filled with drama and rapidly become frightening and squalid and suddenly upsetting.  The boys he meets do not have very good values.  The dropout, who is borderline and violent, cant regain entrance into the right kind of society.  Clark is distant and appropriately mistrustful.  He can never find his way out of the disasters that befall him when he is with his friends, and he feels overwhelmed and pressured.

Clarks friends psyche that is more fragile than they all know, and he pushes others to let him stay where the people are nice and the surroundings are adequate.  He is refused and pushed away abruptly.  Clarks other friend is a drug addict, a hopeless junkie, who is  physically addicted.  He doesnt have enough money to support his habit and the wild dreams about what they all most to do escape their abusive and brutal homes.  Clark isnt oversensitive about his friends, and even though they have serious accidents that lead him down, and lead to his arrest, Clark never regrets and of it, or harbors resentment, or holds a grudge.  He takes life as a matter of course, of learning to grow up on the street, under bad circumstances.

At home, his father is waiting to jump on him.  Feelings between the father and son are very tense, and the hostile feelings get blown up until they are out of proportion.  If Clark has lost track of his activities outside, his father has not, and he pursues his son more and more, never quite forgiving him for his victims.

Clark thinks his fathers reactions are bizarre and uncalled for, and he doesnt care how upset his father is, or know what is really wrong with him.  He is estranged from his father.  They never had any real rapport, because his father was always abusive and accustomed to getting his own way.   He never feels sure that his fathers motives are honest. His father seems determined to make him accountable for his actions.  Finally, after a long crime spree, the father tries to get the police and it results in an arrest, and Clark goes to jail.  After that, his father neglected him and will not bother with him anymore.

Clark assumes that his father finds him less desirable after a bad experience.  There are many other sides of human nature which Clark has to  face up to, and many other problems to unravel while he is in jail.

About the Author

Maria Leevy now lives in Short Hills, NJ She graduated Sarah Lawrence College and attended a graduate writing program at Columbia. This is the first novel she has ever attempted to publish.