In the Shade of a Lightning Rod

It's the spring of 1970. Bobby Rand is a nine-year-old boy, growing up in Roseland, on Chicago's south side. One of his third-grade classmates has lost his mother and lives alone with his twenty-year-old sister, toward whom he bears a pathological hatred: he lures Bobby into a plot to murder her. What happens as a result causes Bobby to suffer a nervous breakdown, and leads to his confinement in a mental hospital. He recovers, but things will never be the same again. He leaves Roseland with his family for another Chicago neighborhood, Marquette Park. In high school, he is an honor student, a star baseball player, and a serious abuser of drugs. The past continues to haunt his life into adulthood. He marries and has two children, and seems to have found redemption. But the past is implacable. In the autumn of 1999, on the eve of the new millennium, he discovers that he is still unable to escape it.

"In the Shade of a Lightning Rod is the story of a boy who faces a series of insidious ordeals as he grows up. Satriano uses thriller techniques to delve into the psychology of his protagonist."
- Cesare Maoli, writer.

"Satriano is a great story-teller. He brings lost worlds back to life."
- Robert Harmon, historian.

John Satriano is a native of Chicago. His original work has appeared in various publications, among which Antaeus and Magic Realism in the U.S. and Nuovi Argomenti and Pastrengo in Italy. He is also a translator and the recipient of PEN's Renato Poggioli Award. Among the authors whose works he has translated are Umberto Eco, Ennio Flaiano, Giorgio Manganelli and Alberto Moravia. He lives in Rome.

Foreword

John Satriano's In the Shade of the Lightning Rod fits perfectly into the "Save Our Stories" mission of the Casa Italia Library. The main characters are Italian, the location is the Roseland neighborhood, and many of the scenes take place in iconic locations of Chicago. The novel touches on the role of the church and family in the development of the characters over a generational time span. Satriano's treatment of controversial clergy abuse is "ripped from the headlines"---adding a compelling element to the narrative.