(Note: This story is a stand-alone excerpt from my second novel, The Ghost of Youth at the Undertakers’ Ball, which I completed during the pandemic and which I will perhaps serialize eventually on Substack. It reimagines Great Expectations, Dickens’s thirteenth novel (serialized 1860-61 and published in book form in 1861).
My novel reimagines Great Expectations like this: it deconstructs the Dickens plot and reassembles the story in Savannah, Georgia in 1949, after which it moves to New York, and elsewhere, then finally back to Savannah in 2001. Readers of Dickens will not be surprised to meet a gallery of hypocrites, toadies, religious fanatics, social climbers, criminals, and clowns, first in the South and then in 1960s and ‘70s Manhattan. Also, if you read between the lines in several Dickens novels, you’ll spot characters who are obliquely homosexual. In my pages it’s unnecessary to squint.
The orphan Dexter Cuffe — my update of Dickens’s Pip — narrates much of the novel, including this excerpt.
Although written in the first person, this story is not autobiographical. I didn’t serve in the military; I’ve never seen Fort Benning; and any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental…perhaps.