My Arm Criesin Blood

My Arm Cries in Blood is a trilogy of noir fiction novels that move across America in the early 2000s — from the underbelly of Charleston to Chicago boardrooms, down the Eastern Seaboard, through Florida, back to Chicago, out toward Tennessee, then Texas, California, Denver, Oregon, Louisiana, and eventually home to the South Carolina coast where it all started. It is dark, unflinching, often uncomfortably funny, and unlike anything you've read before. It was not written to be comfortable. It was written to be true.

Jake Stone is twenty-two years old in December 2002 when he makes a decision: he is going to stop lying. Not about the big things. About everything. He has spent years being the guy in every room with a story a little more interesting than yours — you know the guy — and one day he looked in the mirror and hated what he saw. That's where this starts. Not with a hero. With a man deciding, finally, to find out if there's one in there somewhere.

He is not prepared for what that decision costs him. The people he finds, the money he inherits by proximity to the wrong men, the appetites he discovers in himself — none of it arrives gently. What follows is not a redemption arc. It's something messier. A man burning through his own life trying to figure out, before it's too late, who he actually is.

Joseph R. Jackson is a Clemson legacy. His grandfather walked that campus. His father was head cheerleader and Tiger mascot. By the time Joseph arrived, the expectation didn't need to be spoken. He was a proud Tiger. He still is.

He also knew, somewhere underneath all of it, that he was in the wrong place for the right reasons — that there is a specific kind of quiet that settles over you when you're standing inside something great and still can't find the frequency. He found that quiet. Jake Stone was born inside it.

These books were written between 2008 and 2010 by a younger man who needed to put his confusion somewhere outside himself before it ate him alive. My Arm Cries in Blood is what that looks like when it works. The emotions aren't invented. The events are.

The trilogy carries a content advisory for a reason. Graphic violence. Explicit sexual content. Substance use. Psychological trauma. Grief. Strong language throughout. This is not a series that apologizes for what it contains. It was written by someone who needed to say true things and found that fiction was the only container large enough to hold them.

If you are looking for a story that tells you everything will be okay, this is not it. If you are looking for one that makes you feel less alone in the knowledge that sometimes it won't be — you may have found it.

My Arm Cries in Blood is independently published through Shoeless Works. All three volumes are available now.