"Sean Costello is a master of the poignancy of everyday living. In Here After he tackles a difficult subject with wit and humanity—and a couple of really good scares. It’s a father and son story that will touch your heart."
—Susie Moloney, author of The Dwelling

 "In Here After Sean Costello grabs his readers with both hands; one closes deftly around the heart, offering a touching and devastating glimpse of the loss of a child; the other propels you on a breathless quest, sometimes eagerly, the way a child might lead a parent through a fairground—and sometimes with a startlingly quick chokehold on the windpipe."
—Mark Leslie, contributing author, Bluffs

Here After

This is, by far, the most difficult book I’ve ever written. The first eight manuscript pages were penned in one queasy, breathless rush and remained unviewed for months afterward, sequestered in a nameless file on my desktop, waiting for me to summon the courage to review them.

That ‘courage’ came one day more by accident than intent. I was sitting in the operating room, waiting for my next patient to arrive and scanning through some billing material on my laptop. Thinking the file contained something else, I opened it—and there were these words, less forgotten than ejected from memory, their message more unbearable than anything else I’d ever imagined…the loss of a child. 

Until I became a dad I was pretty much a lost soul, with no clear idea of what my purpose in life actually was. All that changed twenty-four years ago, when my step-daughter came into my life; and, twelve years after that, with the birth of my son.

To write about the loss of a child is, inevitably, to picture one of your own in the same circumstances, and reading those opening pages again filled me with unease, giving me the irrational sense that perhaps by imagining such things, I was somehow inviting them into my life. A career in medicine does little to spare one from baseless superstition, and I was on the verge of double-clicking the whole unnerving thing into digital oblivion… 

But the words had affected me; the intervening months had to some degree distanced me from ownership of them, and I discovered that they did to me exactly what I had intended them to do to a reader…they made me feel.

So I invited a nurse to read them, a gal I’ve known and respected for many years. And as she read, I watched her…and her reactions told me that—just maybe—I was onto something. 

So in spite of the sometimes nerve-wracking emotions the process induced, I finished the novel, and offer it now for your consideration. And while there are moments of sheer terror, both supernatural and horribly real, at its heart Here After is a story of triumph and redemption...and over everything, a story of love.

I am pleased to be working with Laurence Steven and his fine Your Scrivener Press on this project. Laurence has been doing excellent work both as an editor and a publisher in Northern Ontario for many years now, and I consider it a privelage to be counted among the numerous talented writers he represents. 

 Here After is slated to appear in bookstores October 1st. Watch this site for signing dates and a killer launch party featuring the local rock phenomenon Stray Bullet, of which my son is a member.