I WON THIS BOOK ON A MAGIC TRICK. Actually, more precisely, I won the chance to buy this book on a magic trick. I thought that was clever. So I bought the book. The guy doing the magic trick is the author of the book, Sean McGinty. It was a card trick, one of those ‘is this your card’ kind of things. It was, in fact, my card. The King of Spades.
But there’s more to the story…
mem01297a [ rainbow in the dark ] The book is called ‘Rainbow In The Dark.’ It’s featured for one of Ballast Book Company’s book groups this month. They’ve got an event with the author scheduled for Jan. 21 at Cups Espresso in Bremerton.
It is a sci-fi fantasy type read, a young adult novel about a high school senior called Rainbow who is caught up in a depressive set of teenage doldrums on top of a dark imagination. Rainbow’s parents are recently divorced. They’ve moved to a new town on a perpetually gray and miserable coast. Mom works nights now and is gone a lot. The only remaining constant in life, Rainbow’s older brother, is kind of being an asshole. But Rainbow is a kind of being an asshole right back.
One day after the two had been fighting, Rainbow’s brother is no where to be found. Rainbow is concerned and goes searching, which leads to the jagged coastline behind their trailer park where a thick fog is rolling in and the sun is setting. Rainbow’s frantic and calling out from the cliffs but the brother is still nowhere to be found… Fuck! In that instant, as the fog gets too thick to see, Rainbow is sucked into a fantastical land not unlike a video game or RPG that you’ve got to find your way out of. Rainbow comes to, in what’s hopefully a dream state, in an endless grass field. The ocean has disappeared. No idea where this is. The phone blinks ‘no service’ when trying to call 911. Completely alone. And all Rainbow’s memories have been erased.
Rainbow happens into a crew of more experienced players as they collect clues and complete quests on a search for the portal that will supposedly transport them home. There’s magical creatures both virtuous and evil, ominous mechanical forests and demons and an omnipresent god-like being they call ‘Dave’ along the way. There’s friendship, adventure, danger, comedy and despair in this strange world where pants cannot be taken off for any reason, you physically cannot say a swear word and physical contact with any other human is prohibited by an invisible energy force that makes the sound BRRZAP!
Feels like the book might be accompanied nicely by the Dio song of the same name. There’s definitely some ‘Wizard of Oz’ stuff in here. And a little bit of ‘Neverending Story.’ But this story is framed with a more modern parlance. “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz gets the Black Mirror treatment,” Kirkus Reviews wrote of it. And, beneath the fantastical, it turns out to be a frank and empathetic exploration of the darker side of modern young adult mental health.
mem34035 [ it’s hard being a human ] Sean isn’t a magician. He said he learned that trick from Tik Tok. But he is no stranger to magic or the darker side of mental health. Sean is currently an English professor at Olympic College. He’s been teaching in various capacities for quite some time, from an adjunct faculty at a community college that functioned as a feeder school for Stanford to a job with Americorps working with disadvantaged and English-As–Second-Language students.
He attended the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop after graduating from Grinnell College.
He worked on a cannabis farm in Northern California in the days before weed was fully legal in that state while he writing his first novel. He was also a cartoonist and community reporter for the Camas-Washougal Post-Record while living in Portland and would later become a tenured creative writing professor at Mt. Hood Community College before landing at OC in Bremerton.
Every quarter he has his students write first-person, personal essays. With 60 students per quarter, “That’s 180 people a year where I get to see these windows into their lives,” Sean said.
“I’ve noticed what they were into and how dark their stuff was,” he goes on. “It’s so hard out there, people forget. Every quarter, I see so many kids, so many people, struggling. Just struggling. It is hard to be human. That’s where this book came from. It’s like how do you deal with this weird existential situation that you’re in?”
Sean grew up in Elko, Nevada in a place some people referred to as ‘suicide alley.’ He counts a list of people from his life who have been lost to suicide and recounts his own personal story from his 31st birthday when he was ready to take his own life.
He’d been bouncing between jobs in his career life. He had written a novel that looked like it was on its way to being his first published book until the economic collapse of 2008 waylaid the publishing industry and the book was rejected. He had recently come to the end of a longterm relationship. He’d decided to move back in with his parents. He’d been on some medications at the time that were messing with his mental health. One day, he was out riding his childhood bike through the desert alone when it hit him.
“It hit me in the chest, like, holy shit, this was not the plan,” he goes back. “I’d just turned 31. I had no job. No relationship. No house. I’d been working on this book that failed… And that’s the age when your friends start doing stuff, you know… And that just hit me so hard.”
He went back to the house. No one was home at the time. He was looking for a gun. He’d grown up with guns. His dad had also had depressive tendencies so most had been gotten rid of, but Sean was sure there was a revolver somewhere in the house… He found the bullets… and the holster… But he didn’t find the gun… And that, he says, probably saved his life. Not long after that fateful birthday, Sean got a call from a friend, asking if he’d be interested in working on a traditional farm in Colorado. He decided to go for it, packed up his stuff and drove. The friend who called would later become his wife.
mem07123 [ consistent persistence ] One thing that has been consistent in his life, Sean says, is persistence. He says he’s always been writing, obsessively, not just to publish, but more just to get things out of his head. He’s got a great collection on his website.
He published his first book “The End Of Fun” in 2016 which was purchased by Disney. But he’s always had his teaching, or other gigs, as a day job. “How else do you pay the bills, honestly?” he said. One thing that has been paramount to his mental health, he says, is a stable financial situation. “And not everybody has that,” he adds. “Poverty makes everything suck for everybody because everyone’s scrambling for resources.”
It was a symptom of that pervasive poverty situation which led Sean and his wife to move to Kitsap a year ago. They had been living in a rough neighborhood in Portland until there was one too many murders too close to home. First, there was a murder at the corner store where Sean would stop on his way home. Then, there was a mass shooting at a wake, 17 gun shots they could hear from their house. Then, a high school kid got murdered two blocks away, and they decided it was time to get their young family out. Sean started applying for jobs, landed at OC and has found a happy chapter in Bremerton. // BILLMAN
BALLAST BOOKS HOSTS Sean McGinty at 2 p.m., Jan. 21 at Cups Espresso, Bremerton. More at ballastbookco.com and helloseanmcginty.com
