Waiting on a Bridge of Maggots

Waiting for You on a Bridge of Maggots centers on a professional man in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a hardware store manager, whose family—wife, two children—are killed in a plane crash. Coming from the Midwest and a working-class background, he has found the American Dream in a stable life, good salary, “loving” wife and two healthy children. But this good, solid, respectable, middle-class life ends in the opening sentence of the novel.

Unable to handle the shock—not just the death of his entire family but knowing his wife was unfaithful and his love for her was betrayed—he reels into impulsive, dangerous behavior. Having a genetic predisposition to drink, he indulges in alcohol in bars and that soon leads to more chaos in his personal life.

The consequences are rapid and devastating: he destroys his upper-middle-class existence when his neighbor Morghan throws his wife’s infidelity in his face; he will succumb to alcohol and lose his high-paying position at the store. Enabled by insurance money, he will turn his house in an exclusive gated community into an after-hours party scene for a crowd of misfits, intellectuals, drunks, and dope dealers. He will become attracted to a lower-class young woman, abuse her trust, (possibly) rape and impregnate her; he will kill a man in self-defense whose affiliation with an extremist group (Sovereign Citizens) will lead to his neighbors’ house being burned down and his neighbor shot; and, finally, he will be held hostage by family members of the man he killed in a plot to strip him of his remaining wealth. He escapes—is shot by the psychopathic cousin, whom he kills—slowly recovers his health, and returns to a saner life enabled by the love of the young woman and the child she conceived.

The narrator-protagonist is recounting a life-changing series of events that range from his family’s accidental deaths through violence of the most serious kind, arson and homicide, to a descent into the basest depths of his personality to discover who he is and what he can salvage from the wreckage of his once-comfortable, but hollow, existence.

The novel is both a crime novel and a “serious” novel in that the themes of identity and “truth” are continually played off against each other. Other motifs, symbols, etc. will be picked up by the reader.