Oberlin’s Anomaly to appear in Sylva, NC.
Coming in the spring to Sylva, North Carolina! Susette and I are pleased to add this book reading and signing for 2020. We will be appearing at the City Lights Bookstore, a great independent bookstore and community literary center. Sylva is a quaint small town in the mountains of Western North Carolina. I will be reading from and later signing my Science Fiction novel, Oberlin’s Anomaly, starting at 3:00pm on June 13th 2020. City LIghts is located at 3 East Jackson Street in Sylva, North Carolina, 28779 USA.
Susette will be with me showing off her men’s and women’s Anomaly T-Shirts. Free T-Shirt for the first 5 books signed!
Come visit us in the spring
in beautiful WNC!
Oberlin’s Anomaly appears in Greenville, SC
Hello, Greenville South Carolina! I’m excited to be signing books at Fiction Addiction, a great independent bookstore in your town. I will be signing my Sci Fi Novel, Oberlin’s Anomaly starting at 2:30pm on November 30th 2019. Fiction Addiction is located at 1175 Woods Crossing Rd #5, Greenville, SC 29607. Fiction Addiction Facebook
Susette will be with me showing off her men’s and women’s Anomaly T-Shirts. Free T-Shirt for the first 5 books signed!
Come out and see us!
Oberlin’s Anomaly — Book Signing 10/26/19
Hey, NC! I’m signing Oberlin’s Anomaly at Main St. Books! Oct. 26th 10:30am!
Courtesy of the nice folks at GoldLeafliterary.com
126 S. Main St. | Davidson, NC 28036 | 704-892-6841 @mainstreet books
Wolf — Jack Starkey’s Protector and Sooleawa’s Avenger
Oberlin’s Anomaly Photo Fine Art America
THE FAR SIDE OF SUCCESS
951 Thanks to all the friends and Asheville book lovers who came out to hear Tommy Hays and I discuss Oberlin’s Anomaly at Malaprop’s Bookstore/Cafe in Asheville, NC on August 5. You set me on the far side of success.
Glen Echo Amusement Park, Cabin John Maryland
The historic Glen Echo Amusement park, just outside Washington, DC, is an important setting in Oberlin’s Anomaly and in the life of the author. Through much of the novel action takes place near, within, and outside the park in historic flashbacks and in the current time. The author rode the Dentzel Carousel, the heart of the park, in his childhood, and he and his wife were married beside it in what is now Glen Echo National Park.
This video captures the spirit of the park in earlier days and goes on to show Marshall Hall, another DC amusement park.
Here the historic carousel has been restored.
L Chance Shiver presents Oberlin’s Anomaly at Malaprop’s Bookstore/Cafe
Chance will present Oberlin’s Anomaly at Malaprop’s Bookstore/Cafe in Asheville on Monday, August 5th at 6pm. Tommy Hays, Director of the Great Smokies Writing Program, will join him in conversation about the book. Please come and join us in placing the capstone on the completion of years of work at this iconic, independent bookstore in Asheville, NC.
Malaprop’s Bookstore/Cafe 55 Haywood St. Asheville, NC
Oberlin's Anomaly Released, Sci Fi Novel Unmasks Alien Intervention
ASHEVILLE, N.C., April 12, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Did you ever wonder if our human ancestors came down from the trees, crawled out the caves, and created civilization all on their own? Or did they have some help? The gripping new science fiction novel from L Chance Shiver reveals the alien cause of early man's acceleration from Neanderthal to Einstein.
Contact – Review copies: Chance Shiver - Phone 828-989-6263. www.chanceshiver.com. www.Instagram.com/lchanceshiver www.twitter.com/lchanceshiver www.facebook.com/lchanceshiver1
OBERLIN'S ANOMALY RELEASED MARCH 13TH!
Now available through your local indie bookstore in paperback and also in paperback and eBook through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and elsewhere.
REVIEWS:
Buckle up for a wild ride! Shiver’s Sci Fi thriller drops the reader into a battle for the fate of humanity itself. The opposition is formidable, but the Warriors are gathering…
Vicki Lane
Author of the Elizabeth Goodweather Appalachian Mysteries
The District of Columbia has never seen such a titanic conflict as the one here between aliens and genetically enhanced humans. The Warriors sweep through time and space in thrilling fashion.
David Molke-Hansen
Historian and Editor
As someone whose job it is to read, I’m always looking for any excuse to go fix a cup of tea ore to get up and look out the window. But as I read Oberlin’s Anomaly, Chance Shiver’s riveting, eloquent embodiment of an alien world within our own, my tea grew cold and whatever the neighbors were up to had to wait. Taken might be another title for Shiver’s thoughtful page-turner, because that’s what the readers will be from page one.
Tommy Hays
Author of the Pleasure Was Mine
Oberlin’s Anomaly - Early Spring Release
It’s coming. The days are getting shorter. My Sci Fi novel, Oberlin’s Anomaly, will hit the shelves and the ether waves soon.
A violent attack on a man’s life begins an astounding mental and physical metamorphosis. Still struggling to recover from grief and depression, he must adapt to the true nature of his reality and his role in an ancient, galactic conflict.
EARLY REVIEWS:
Buckle up for a wild ride! Shiver’s Sci Fi thriller drops the reader into a battle for the fate of humanity itself. The opposition is formidable, but the Warriors are gathering . . .
Vicki Lane -- Author of the
Elizabeth Goodweather Appalachian Mysteries
CHAPTER EIGHT: OBERLIN’S ANOMALY
VIOLA
C&O Canal Great Falls MD June 1901
Vernon Hilliard raised the boat horn to his lips and blew a long, groaning call. He squared himself on the rear deck of the canal boat, Shenandoah, and set aside the horn. He took the tiller with both hands, planted his bare feet wide, and steered down the center of the canal. Blackish water passed beneath the boat, sliced by the rudder, and the green bottom of the boat left a wide wake behind. Away down the canal he saw Violet’s Lock, still distant, through the white oak trees that lined the shore. Spring had come early, and the Redbuds along the bank of the Potomac River began to bloom as the days started to heat up.
Vernon rubbed the back of his neck, stiff from an overnight at the tiller. He pulled off his battered grey fedora and wiped his balding head with his shirt sleeve. Yes, he was tired. The run down from Cumberland always took its toll, but Vernon made no complaints. He’d come out of the mountains, like many men before him, seeking a living wage, and he’d found he enjoyed life on the canal. He had been ‘a-boatin’ some five years now, hauling coal down to Georgetown, and empty barrels or general merchandise back up to the towns along the canal. He was judged to be one of the best of the boat captains that plied the C&O Canal from Cumberland, Maryland to Georgetown, DC. That meant he stayed unusually sober for a canal boat man. Most of the captains and the crew who worked for them drank heavily, and the taverns along River Street in Georgetown and all the towns up and down the Potomac River knew them well. Vernon avoided their company. He drank little and only between runs.
His older sister Ophelia climbed out of the little cabin of the boat onto the narrow deck and stood with her back turned to him. Her long gray hair pushed up, she pinned it there to keep it off her neck in the heat. Tall like her brother but broader built, people called her horse-faced behind her back, but never to her face. Fearless and proud and stronger than most men, large muscles knotted her arms and legs. A life of physical labor spent on a hardscrabble farm in the mountains had made her formidable. She wore bib overalls like her brother, frayed and patched many times, but clean.
Ophelia’s daughter, Viola, poked her head out of the cabin and clambered onto the whitewashed deck beside her mother. Vernon reached out to smooth her blond hair with one brown, callused hand. “Well, looky here, if it ain’t my new little boater,” Vernon said. “Did the horn blowin’ wake you up, honey?”
“Yes, Uncle Vernon,” Viola said. She pulled down on the hem of her yellow sundress to straighten it. “What’s the horn for?”
“That’s how we tell the locktender we’re a’comin’ and to ready the lock,” he said. “You remember I told you how the locks lower you when you’re going down to Georgetown and raise you up when you’re a’comin back?”
“Yes, sir,” said Viola.
Ophelia climbed up on the canal boat roof, stepped down a bit, and sat down cross-legged. She took her banjo out of its tow sack and launched into an old ballad, “Little Omie Wise,” her voice spare and lonesome.
“Here, now we got to get a line on you, Viola honey,” Vernon said. “You know you can’t be out here on deck without your line until you get used to walking around the deck.”
“’Deed I know, or I might fall in the canal and drown like Omie Wise,” Viola said.
“We don’t talk about drownin’ much out here on the canal, honey, it’s bad luck,” he said, raising his voice so Ophelia could hear. He threw a half-hitch around and above the girl’s waist, and snugged it up under her arms. When her eyes were elsewhere he looked down at the growing bulge of her stomach and shook his head slowly.
“Viola,” Ophelia called. She stopped singing and set her banjo down, waving a hat. “Come get your straw hat, that sun’s got the power today.”
“Ophelia, can you bring it down here?” Vernon said, “I’ve put the line on her.”
Ophelia shuffled along the narrow white deck and brought the hat down to Viola. She stood watching her daughter as she put the hat on, and the love in his sister’s eyes for her daughter seemed nearly overflowing to Vernon. Vernon knew Ophelia to be gentle and caring with the children. She loved her Viola, and his own boy, James, with the fierce love Appalachian women can have for family. “Come not between a mother and her child”, the mountain saying went, and if it was ever true of any woman, it was surely true of Ophelia Hilliard.
Vernon looked to James up ahead on the shaded towpath. The boy had sprouted this past winter and his long arms stuck out of his shirt sleeves and his pants legs rode up past his ankles. The old snap brim cap James wore to keep the sun out of his eyes barely covered his clump of red hair. The boy steered the big mules along the gravel towpath, stooping once in a while to pick up a rock and skip it across where the river cut in close. Ophelia acted as a second mother to his boy. His sister came down from their home place in the Blue Ridge Mountains to ‘do’ for James and Vernon after Vernon’s wife died. Vernon knew the real reason she’d come, though. Ophelia also left to escape the prying eyes and wagging tongues of the backward villagers of their home back ‘up the country’ when Viola’s “condition” began to show. But now folk began to talk around Cumberland, too. She could expect more of the same. So the way things were Vernon reckoned the girl and his sister might as well come on ‘a-boatin’.
Ophelia went back to her seat on top of the cabin and took up her banjo. Vernon heard her start in playing again. Damned if she didn’t start to sing that one about Johnny Howard who got hanged for killing his boat captain.
“Christ Almighty, Ophelia, can’t you sing no songs ‘cept about murder and drownin’?” Vernon said.
“Vernon Hilliard, do not take the Lord’s name in vain,” Ophelia said. She didn’t seem offended, however, and paid him no mind. She finished that song and struck up “Banks of the Ohio,” another murder ballad.
Vernon shook his head. She’s mighty contrary sometimes. He heard the relief mules scuffling about in the forward cabin, their big hooves scrapping against the bottom of the boat. Ophelia’s songs or something else made them uneasy. He reckoned they didn’t like banjo music too much. He put his mind on steering the canal boat down towards the lock, watching James out ahead passing under the big sycamore trees that lined the canal along here.
The Shenandoah moved on down, arriving at lock #7. The warm afternoon sun filtered through the trees along the towpath. Vernon’s sweaty overalls and shirt stuck to his back. Green shadows and light flickered on the red roof of the boat, and Vernon watched Viola, her back against the cabin wall, dangle her pale legs over the rail, the heels of her black shoes clicking against the gunnels. He heard Ophelia frailing away on the banjo, no words this time, just an old fiddle tune she called “Sally Ann”.
“Whoa, Jack, whoa Tom.” Vernon heard James yell out ahead on the towpath. “Oh, ouch goddamit, he’s stepped on my foot!”
Up ahead, Vernon could see James hopping on one foot and struggling to hold down Jack, the big lead mule and Tom, the second, as they reared and pulled at the leads. Jack, lurching about the towpath, stamped his huge hooves.
“Are you all right, James?” His father called from the stern.
“No, Daddy, something spooked the mules, and this god dam’ jackass has stomped my foot.” James said. He hopped to the side of the towpath and tied the mules’ leads to a big white oak.
“There’s no excuse for cussing,” Viola said. She said it again, ‘sing-songing’ it this time.
“Let the boy be, girl,” said her uncle. “I reckon you ain’t been stepped on by one of them big hooves of Jack’s, it’s enough to make anyone cuss.”
Vernon put the tiller hard over and brought the canal boat to the towpath side. He slid the fallboard off the roof and made a bridge to the towpath. God help us if he’s hurt bad. The next doctor lived some two hours away in Georgetown. They’d barely passed lock number seven.
“Ophelia, come take the tiller,” Vernon said. “I’ll take Viola and see how bad the boy’s foot is.”
Ophelia hurried to put her banjo back in the tow sack and climbed off the cabin roof. As she stepped down to the deck from the roof, Vernon heard the relief mules inside the small stable area lurching about. She teetered along the narrow deck beside the cabins and took the tiller from Vernon.
Vernon removed the line from around Viola’s waist and, holding her hand, stepped on the fallboard to cross over to the towpath.
The two side-stepped half+way across the wooden fallboard when the canal boat lurched away from the bank. The end of the fallboard slipped off the deck, and, turning slowly downward, dumped Viola and her uncle into the dark, murky water.
Vernon surfaced, coughing. He saw Viola rise further out in the canal.
Viola screamed. “Mama!” She disappeared beneath the water.
“Vernon, oh my blessed Jesus, what is that?” Ophelia said.
Vernon looked where she pointed and saw a shape in the water at the back of the canal boat becoming partly visible now, its broad and scaly back breaching the surface. He glimpsed Viola’s blond hair and blue dress beneath the surface of the water, starting to move away with the thing.
Vernon stared, stricken.
“Viola!” Ophelia flung herself off the canal boat and onto the monster that clutched her child. She clambered astride, gripped the thing’s back with her left hand and striking it with her right fist, rained blow after blow upon it, hammering at the thing.
“No, no, no, God damn you. Let her go.” Ophelia bit and scratched and clawed at the creature until at last it reared, heaving the woman up and off its massive back. Long yellow talons at the end of the wing-like arm slashed backward at the woman’s face as she hurtled through the air. She landed like a broken thing half on the gravel towpath and half in the water.
Vernon, standing up to his waist in the canal, stared in horror at Ophelia lying beside him. Three razor-clean cuts sliced away the left side of her face, cuts so deep that the cheek and jaw bones lay bared. Her left eye completely gone, Ophelia lay quaking. The blood from the deep gouges in her face ran in rivulets across and down the grass and green leaves of the weeds on the canal bank into the water, and the red stain spread away on the current that flowed south down to Georgetown.
OBERLIN’S ANOMALY - CHAPTER 17 - HEATER'S ISLAND
Heater’s Island and the Piscataway Indians
Vandercastle and Harrison meet the Piscataway in 1699 (painting by William Woodward).
In chapter 17 of Oberlin’s Anomaly Sooleawa, sometimes known as Hannah Cassidy, tells the main characters, Jack Starkey and Sheila Cartwright that she was born on Heater’s Island near Frederick, MD in 1699. She and other characters in the novel identify themselves as Piscataway Indians. Historically the Piscataway were first encountered near the confluence of the Potomac River with Piscataway Creek in southern Maryland in 1608 by Captain John Smith. The Piscataway moved throughout the area, sometimes found as far north as the foothills of Virginia.
Based on historical documents we have a picture of the Piscataway Fort on Heater’s Island. In 1699, two emissaries of the Virginia governor, Vandercastle and Harrison, traveled to the island and found a fort some fifty to sixty yards square and containing and surrounded by cabins. It was estimated that approximately three hundred people men, women and children inhabited the settlement.
This group of Piscataway from Heater’s Island left Maryland around 1712, but there were other Piscataway Indians still living in southern Maryland where they continue to do so. Today, many in southern Maryland identify as Piscataway. In 2012 Governor Martin granted state recognition to three separate Piscataway groups: the Piscataway-Conoy Confederacy, the Piscataway Indian Nation, and the Cedarville Band of Piscataway.
In Chapter 6 the fictional Piscataway Indians are encamped on the Potomac River above Georgetown, DC and below Little Falls near the modern day Fletcher’s Boat House. They have set up a temporary fishing camp to take the striped bass that are migrating.
Source material used with permission from Jefferson Patterson Park and Museum, 10515 Mackall Road, St. Leonard, Maryland 20685. https://www.jefpat.org/diagnostic/SmallFinds/Site%20Summaries/18FR72HeatersIsland.htm
Author: Dennis C. Curry
OBERLIN’S ANOMALY - CHAPTER 4 - SUTER'S TAVERN
Chapter 4 of Oberlin’s Anomaly takes place in at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA and at Cassidy's Tavern on the Georgetown, DC waterfront. The tavern fronts the Potomac River on Fishing Lane. It is modeled after Suter’s Tavern, also known as The Fountain Inn. Suter’s was one of Georgetown's best-known hostelries. Although some controversy exists about the exact location, John Suter likely established the tavern in 1783 in Georgetown on Fishing Lane, placing it near the intersection of31st and K Streets, NW, or on nearby High Street, the modern day Wisconsin Avenue. Suter operated this tavern until his death in 1794, and his wife and son continued to do so afterward. In later years the tavern became an oyster house as pictured in the Library of Congress photo above and finally disappeared. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other notable residents frequented the tavern in its heyday. It was commonplace in those times for this, Georgetown’s most famous tavern, to provide lodging for travelers and to be the site of important business meetings, including the planning for the budding Washington City.
Suter’s Tavern (The Fountain Inn) in Georgetown (Library of Congress)
In Chapter 4 of The Oberlin Anomaly Thomas Jefferson is staying in the fictional tavern and takes part in the story. It is known historically that Thomas Jefferson frequented Suter’s Tavern and once stated that “no man on the Atlantic coast can bring out a better bottle of Madeira or Sherry than old Suter.”
Elsewhere in the novel the fictional tavern has become the site of The Protean Society, and the scene for much of the action that takes place in the present time. It is no accident that the fictional Protean Society building sits near 31st and K Streets, NW, one possible site of Suter’s Tavern and adjacent to Thomas Jefferson Street, Georgetown.
^ Holmes, Oliver W. (1980). The City Tavern: A Century of Georgetown History, 1796-1898. Columbia Historical Society; City Tavern Association reprint. p. 5.
^ Ecker, Grace Dunlop (1933). A Portrait of Old Georgetown. Garrett & Massie, Inc. p. 18.
^ Holmes, Oliver W. (1980). The City Tavern: A Century of Georgetown History, 1796-1898. Columbia Historical Society; City Tavern Association reprint. pp. 2, 5.
^ Holmes, Oliver W. "Suter's Tavern: Birthplace of the Federal City". Records of the Columbia Historical Society. 73-74: 1–34.
OBERLIN’S ANOMALY - CHAPTER EIGHT - C&O CANAL
Chapter Eight of Oberlin’s Anomaly takes place in 1901 along the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal above Georgetown, DC. Most of the novel has its setting along the canal and nearby Washington, DC and Maryland in the current time, but there are flash backs like chapter eight, Viola past historical periods.
The Chesapeake & Ohio Canal (C&O Canal) runs for some one hundred and eighty-four miles north along the Potomac River from Washington, DC to Cumberland Maryland. Historically canal boats transported coal and sometimes fruits and vegetables down to Washington and Alexandria, Va. The canal operated from 1831 until 1924 along the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., to Cumberland, Maryland. It was built because the Potomac River is not navigable above Little Falls. The entire length of the canal now forms the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park.
The canal descends 605 feet down from Cumberland to Washington and this required the building of seventy-four locks that lowered the canal boats during the route. A towpath ran along the side of the canal, and horses and mules and their leaders traveled the path towing the boats. Eleven aqueducts were built to convey the canal over intervening rivers and streams.
The canal varies in width from 80 at the southern end to 50 feet wide at the northern end and runs some six feet deep. The canal boats made a round trip from Cumberland to DC or Alexandria in about twenty days, thirteen days down and seven days to return. This was done running the boats during the day. Some captains made trips in fourteen days or less running all night.
The captains of the canal boats often bought their boats from a coal company like The Cumberland Coal Company. They could get mortgages from these companies and pay them back on an installment plan. They made their payments by the load, paying perhaps $40.00 per each trip the length of the canal.
Families, like that of Vernon, James, Ophelia and Viola Hilliard in the novel, lived aboard the freight boats that carried the coal.
