Good Little Innkeeper

Good Little Innkeeper spans twenty years of one man's life, from a boyhood in rural Georgia to a fifteen-room inn at nine thousand feet in the Colorado Rockies.

As a child he acquires a watcher: a second self, one step behind and one inch above, that helps him read a world he cannot read from the inside. The watcher sees him build a life out of charm and performance. It sees the drinking hired for one job, ending the day.

There is no cinematic bottom in this book, because there was not one. There is an ordinary evening when the performance stops working. Then there is getting sober, when the world returns at full volume, including every frequency the drinking had been hired to quiet.

The book is narrated by the watcher itself. It speaks of him in the third person the whole way through, because that is the only voice wide enough for what it kept.

Readers of Still, by Design. will recognize the innkeeper: Elias, the caretaker of that book, now given the reckoning it only promised. Good Little Innkeeper stands alone, and it also serves as that one's prequel. Readers kept asking where Elias came from, and here is the answer.