Utopia Shattered: And Other Stories

From the mind of award winning author and social media sensation Kevin Lake comes Utopia Shattered, his greatest work of literature to date!
In a small college town, a middle aged man takes a part time job in a sports bar during the holidays in order to earn an extra bit of Christmas cash to better provide for his family during the season. He meets Jinn, a man of Middle Eastern descent, who, though friendly and seemingly good intentioned at first, appears, as time goes on, to be the devil incarnate. Through a series of wishes granted to the school's young, na?ve quarterback, Percy Jones, Jinn shows that his intentions were never pure, and there was nothing friendly about him from the start, as each wish granted to the young quarterback comes with terrifying consequences that he, nor anyone else could have imagined. The expression, 'be careful what you wish for, ' is a dramatic understatement in this terrifying tale straight out of middle ages Arabic folklore.
Other stories in the work include Mea Culpa, where a man's guilt from a terrible deed from his past leads to his willingness to face execution as a result of his admission of fault, an even exchange, as he sees it, just to let go of the all consuming feelings of guilt associated with his devious deed from his past which took the lives of many, and destroyed the lives of many more.
An Altar Boy's Confession is a story of murder and mayhem, centered around an unknown small town serial killer that the authorities refuse to acknowledge due to the fact that the killer's victims happen to be local undesirables. When a young altar boy, however, comes into the knowledge of who the killer actually is, he is faced with, in that very moment of obtaining said knowledge, confronting the killer, face to face, and perhaps having his own life ended.
A Haunted Block Of Wood is a humorous, yet eerie tale of a group of lifelong friends who get together high atop a mountain, in a very remote cabin each Christmas season to celebrate life, with the climax of the party being the mid-night gag gift exchange. When the gift of a piece of wood, embedded with a chunk of gold, said to be cursed by the devil himself is introduced as a gift, no one is laughing, because the curse the block of wood is said to possess, does, indeed, come with it.
Finally, in A Letter From A Parent, we see just how far an influential adult in the life of a young, struggling teen can go. We come to understand the importance of parents not just 'being' in their children's lives by simply living in the same house, but by actually 'being present and involved' in their child's life activities. This is a story, much needed in our modern times, as it addresses the serious issue of over mothering and under fathering male children in modern U.S. society.
Though it's been several years since the last release of a true work of great fiction by Kevin Lake, Utopia Shattered is proof that it's been well worth the wait.