From Words Bookstore:
Columbia High School graduate Laura Tillman returns to Maplewood on Wednesday, April 20 at 7:30 p.m., where she will be discussing and signing her book “The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts” at [words] bookstore.
author Laura Tillman (Words Bookstore)
The small ghosts of debut author Tillman’s title are those of three young children, innocent of any wrongdoing, who were killed in March 2003 by a drugged, arguably insane young man, the father of one of the victims, and his common-law wife. And not just killed: apparently convinced that the children were possessed, John Allen Rubio stabbed them repeatedly and decapitated them. Not for nothing is one of the chapters titled “Don’t Read This Chapter Before Going to Bed”: the facts of the case are horrific.
A journalist working in Brownsville, Texas, when the case occurred, Tillman writes of her initial reluctance to engage the story. “I had never been drawn to tragic crimes,” she writes. “Like many people, I pushed them out of mind when I could. It was easier to box them up and store them on a mental shelf of humanity’s worst moments.”
Engaging her journalist training, Tillman looked deeply into the life and mind of Rubio, with whom she corresponded as he idled on death row, alternately convinced that he was the hero of the piece and aware of his guilt. Her resulting book has been described as “In Cold Blood” meets Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s “Random Family” meets “Helter Skelter.”
Admission to the event is free, with no prior registration or book purchase required.
Words Bookstore, 179 Maplewood Avenue, Maplewood, NJ
