This novel has a long, peculiar history — most of it spent in a dark drawer.

I had the idea in graduate school, the basic plot and setting. I even wrote three chapters, although I put them away and lost them during a move. At the time, the book was to be called Bring My Coffin Along, a line I lifted from Celine’s Death on the Installment Plan, if I remember correctly. That line is now the title of the first section of Heaven and Hell. (The others are The Hells are Everywhere and Beatific Visions?)

When I finally returned to the idea and wrote the book a few years ago, I realized I had written a book that, although a Western, was more than a simple addition to that genre, and so a book unsimple to publish. Unsure what to do with it, I eventually slipped it into a drawer, consigning it to darkness. Later, by chance, I got Norton to read it. They didn’t take it but they were gracious in declining praise, themselves unsure what to do with it. It went back into the drawer. And then, tired of it nagging me from the dark, I decided that I would publish it as a Newton Priors novel, given the prior existence of my pseudonym. So a few days ago I did.

An editor friend was one of the first readers of the final draft, and her comment today, after posting a review, was: “I didn’t want to mention too much about your literary allusions, which were fabulous, because I think the story stands without them. I also enjoyed the theological material, it was beautifully done. Really, you put this off as ‘just something I wrote,’ but it is really special. I would love to have written something like this!”

Bear in mind that, although there is a love story at the heart of H&H, I am using ‘Romance’ in the title as Hawthorne used it in House of the Seven Gables.

There’s a link to the book on the Fiction page.