Novel · St. Martin’s Press · 1997
Paroled from prison after serving time for a rape that he cannot recall, Denton Hake tries to rebuild his life, but when his new girlfriend is killed during one of his terrifying memory lapses, he must find out what they mean before it is too late…
A People magazine Beach Book of the Week
A tour de force… an unforgettable novel powered by a searing and haunting narrative voice.
Tom on Out of Body
Out of Body had two sources of inspiration. One was my friendship with Keri Isbell, a woman with dissociative identity disorder whom I met when I was hired to write a movie for NBC, Shattered Mind, about her life as a wife and mother. The novel is dedicated to her. The second source was a harrowing incident related by another friend: the discovery, by her preteen daughter, of her father’s suicide. The protagonist’s dissociative reactions to this backstory form the spine of the novel, whose reviews were overwhelmingly positive. The enthusiastic blurb I received from Harry Crews, one of my favorite authors, hangs on the wall in my office.
