Sharing my recent interview with book reviewer Jessica Dickenson.
Thriller writer Michael Geczi takes an otherworldly spin in his newest book.
Take an ordinary book about middle-aged strife, add a week where everything seems to go wrong, and then add a neighbor who has come back from the dead.
Healing, forgiving, resilience, and second chances all form the refreshing new book, Equinox by Michael Geczi.
The book follows project manager Nancy Carruthers who never met a project she couldn’t manage. But then an August weekend rolls around, Nancy’s mother has a stroke, her MIA ex shows up at the door saying he wants to get to know their son after 12 years, and her neighbor, Carl, who died two years ago is back ready with inspiration, insights, and advice.
What would you do? Nancy isn’t the only one who can see and hear Carl, and it is a good thing too. The deceased octogenarian isn’t godlike by possessing otherworldly abilities or wisdom, but he has a lot of insight to help Nancy and her family weather the tumult of their situation. He’s a more astute Clarence to Nancy’s George Bailey. With a listening ear and practical advice for the character as well as the readers, the supernatural becomes ordinary but no less magical.
Although Geczi deals with the supernatural, captures an organic experience without taking a specifically religious direction. It’s a spiritual book about healing, forgiveness, growth, and self-love without the didacticism of a religious book.
Before you embark on this journey with this family to the other side of believing, you can learn more about the author, Michael Geczi.
Tell us a little bit about yourself. What inspires you as an author?
Actually, several things. One is the same answer I assume most authors would give: I love trying to create realistic characters and realistic challenges that reach out from the written word and touch and affect readers. As part of that, it’s really interesting to create a pace and cadence that I can viscerally feel and experience as I write. And, because I am a pantser and not a plotter, it’s great fun seeing where these characters end up taking me.
How did you come up with the idea for Equinox? Did you draw on any personal experiences when writing Equinox? Are there any specific scenes and/or characters that you draw from life?
Believe it or not, I developed the original idea for Equinox 35 years ago, when I was working from my home office. Each day, I watched my neighbor across the street, who was in his eighties, deal with the ravages of Parkinson’s Disease and the long, long days – and short nights – the disease brought to his life. I watched him daily try to pass the time and get from sunrise to sundown, working nonstop despite his disability.
At that time, I wrote what I thought were the first five chapters, creating Carl as a living character with PD, along with the other main characters who remain today. Nancy’s mother, Olivia, even had a stroke in the original draft. The Carl scenes in the street, his yard, and polishing his car were drawn from observing the real Carl across the street.
And then the five chapters sat in an old Zip drive until this past summer when I was able to extract about 50% of the text and transfer it to my laptop. Ironically, in the decades since I have witnessed PD and stroke first-hand in my family and have learned a great deal about both.
Nancy – and Maggie, for that matter – are strong women inspired by the strongest woman I know, my wife Lisa.
It is a unique choice to have one of the main characters be deceased when the book starts. How did you come up with the character of Carl? Is there any specific reason why he had to be deceased? Do you think having him be the neighbor with Parkinson’s would have had the same impact? Why or why not?
Carl did start off as the live neighbor with Parkinson’s Disease. However, as I began re-working the book in 2023, I found that Carl alive played a much smaller role in the story dynamics than I wanted. To me, his ability to influence and help the family was dependent upon their noticing him and learning from watching him rather than from interacting with him. I thought his ability to influence the family was greater with him being deceased. And I liked that he really wasn’t certain at first why or how he was back. I also liked that Nancy – who was never befuddled by anything – was desperately trying to figure out Carl’s “angle.”
In all honesty, I also thought the book was somewhat nonspecific from a genre standpoint, and making it lightly speculative would give it some greater “curb appeal.”
There are some scenes in this book that deal with some heavy topics. How did you approach writing them?
The characters led me. I knew what the last scene was going to be. And I had a sense of what I hoped Carl would be able to achieve by that time. The challenge was to determine how they all got there while being true to each of their individual character arcs as well as the overall story arc. It was also interesting to determine the order in which character arcs would get completed.
I felt these people – even Carl during his time back in the neighborhood — were real and had real issues to address and resolve. I developed personal feelings about each of them as they interacted, struggled, ached, and even laughed.
Looking to the future, do you have any other books planned?
Yes. Oddly enough, Equinox was an entirely different genre for me. My three books before Equinox were a nonfiction investment book and then two books about serial killers: The Deadly Samaritan and Killer Dead, Victim Alive. They are part of The Serial Killer Anthology, and I am working on a third book in that anthology series. Just for the record, the label is a bit misleading as the books are about the impact of serial killers on communities, people, culture, and behavior, and are not violent. In fact, Killer Dead, Victim Alive begins with the serial killer dead on page one.
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT MICHAEL GECZI, CHECK OUT THE LINKS BELOW!
Goodreads Profile:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/40413123.Michael_Geczi
Amazon Author Profile:
https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B0C7MWF26L
Author Website:
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