To Cinders: Confessions of a Recovering Catholic

To Cinders is set in the drug fueled San José music scene during the 1990’s, a period marked by over indulgence in the shadow of the dreaded millennium. The story is a bildungsroman about Michael Graves, a troubled 24-year-old musician and college dropout who has traded in his academic and artistic potential to work as a Repo man in a rent-to-own store. Death has settled down around Michael’s life “like a pair of grim bookends.” His coping mechanisms of excessive hedonism and first-class avoidance had always proven highly effective, until he is faced with his own imminent demise. Plagued by guilt and anxiety, he soon realizes that he “has been lovingly courting the very thing that he fears the most.” The story bristles with Generation X sarcasm about sex and religion, young adulthood, drug usage and the pressures of living up to societal expectations in Silicon Valley.