Don Vernay

Today and Tomorrow Don Vernay

Today and Tomorrow is a distillation of the author?s twenty plus years experience in handling death penalty cases, and provides a unique glimpse into the mind of a young man about to be executed for a terrible crime and the chain of events that brought him to the last day of his life. In the same manner as Joyce Carol Oates? Zombie and Patrick McGrath?s Spider, the novel takes place totally within the mind of this young man, who almost comically attempts to make his way in a world that he can neither understand nor fully grasp, and through no real fault of his own winds up paying a terrible price resulting from his quest for a naive dream, the genesis of which is the trauma resulting from his having caused a terrible accident which resulted in the death of his sibling. Because of his limited vision as result of the abuse he has suffered at the hands of those with whom he has come into contact, the characters in the book remain nameless, and can only be described by him according to the function his mind can assign to them. Thus, he functions in a world he has created that is both beyond good and evil and completely lacking in alternatives for him to pursue his dream, as twisted and tragicomic as it may be, and results in not only the loss of his own life, but also the lives of those who have brought him into this world he created.