Rabid
Authors: T K Kenyon
| Rabid |
| T K Kenyon |
| Kunati Inc. (2012) |
Science proves it: there is no God.
The graduate student, her professor, his wife, her priest: four brilliantly realized characters spin out of control in a world where science and religion are in constant conflict. RABID examines the madness of blind faith in either.
A priest of the modern Roman Inquisition arrives in a New England college town to investigate allegations of child abuse by the local parish priests who have suddenly, mysteriously disappeared. The priest, a famous scientist in his own right, is immediately drawn into the private hell, and bed, of a pretty parishioner who confesses that she wants to kill her husband, because of his infidelity. The self-absorbed husband, a prominent scientist/professor, is relentlessly driven by his mad quest to win the Nobel prize, and by his lust for casual sex with grad student assistants. When one of them falls ill with a mysterious neurological disorder, no one knows how bad things really are. Until, that is, the subject of the professor's secret research is revealed.
The brilliantly depicted head-to-head between faith and science comes to a shocking conclusion.
RABID
Second Edition
By: TK Kenyon
Published by
Malachite Publishing
Copyright 2012 by TK Kenyon
Amazon Edition
Discover other books by TK Kenyon:
“All the beauty and terror found in religion and
all the beauty and terror found in science”
“[In
RABID: A Novel
] Kenyon pulls together all the beauty and terror found in religion and all the beauty and terror found in science to create a fictional space where every person seeks light, whether at the lab bench, or at the church altar, or both. We all of us are seekers and sinners; we, the devout and the damned, are all the same.”
-Barbara J. King,
Bookslut
“What's next? What's next?”
“[
RABID: A Novel
is a] solid good read by novelist TK Kenyon, a gifted writer who has crafted a book of such mystery that you find yourself, at midnight, on the edge of your seat, asking, ‘What's next? What's next?’”
- Thom Jones, Award-Winning author of:
The Pugilist at Rest, Cold Snap, Sonny Liston was a Friend of Mine
All characters and events appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
TK Kenyon’s Bio and Other Links
Pink?
Under the stale khaki pants and blue shirts in her husband’s suitcase, Bev glimpsed something
pink
, and her fingers gathered the soft fabric.
Pink
slithered soft and silky like crawling smoke out of the suitcase and hung in the air in front of her.
Pink panties.
Not her own and certainly several sizes too large.
And stained yellow in the crotch.
Her skull burned white-hot under her skin. Her stomach rattled and snapped.
Bev lunged into the bathroom and hung over the open toilet but couldn’t even be sick and she pressed her temple against the cool yellow wall, pulled back and let her head fall against the wall again, then harder.
She dangled the underwear over the gaping toilet. The panties,
someone else’s
pink silk panties and horrid camisole swung above the gaping porcelain and water. Her fingers loosened and the panties slipped but she grabbed them again, slammed the toilet lid down, and sat.
She threw the damned panties against the wall with a strong right-handed whip that should have embedded the silk in the plaster but the underwear slid to the floor.
Her heart slammed so hard that her temples bulged and her carotid arteries hurt in her neck, threatening a stroke. She drummed her head against the wall in fast time with her hammering pulse.
The bastard. The goddamn, cheating bastard.
Her skull smacked the wall and she rattled inside.
Again.
Harder.
She wanted a drink but there was no liquor in the house. She wanted to drink herself unconscious to stop the sight of those pink panties in her eyes and stop the vomit in her throat and stop her mind from hating him. She knew that drinking would make it all worse but she wanted a drink.
On his way from the airport to the university, Conroy had dropped off his suitcase at home. That other woman might be one of those other scientists from the convention, or it might have been a real whore, a prostitute, he had bought while he was in Washington.
Bev was stupid. She was a stupid doormat. She slammed her stupid head against the wall.
If Bev told her friends, they would know that she was a stupid doormat, and they would tell her to leave him, and she couldn’t.
If she cried all over Conroy, he would say she was being manipulative like his mother and he would get mad.
God, she was so stupid and she didn’t want anyone to know how stupid she was, not Lydia and Laura and Mary, not Conroy.
Bev’s temples pounded. Her fingertips throbbed like she was ripping out the whore’s throat. Her palms burned from the heat of a match setting the whore on fire. Her arms strained with the effort of shooting or strangling or bashing the whore.
Or stabbing. A big, strong knife that slipped in at the right angle with the force of a good golf swing that made crisp contact, and the whore would gush blood.
It was sin again to dwell on those terrible images.
She
had sinned.
The bathroom and the house and the world echoed with the absence of God. She was a sinner, everyone was a sinner, but she was disgusting and horrible to God.
Confessing the violence to Father Nicolai would make the thoughts go away. She was so alone, and those evil, sinful thoughts had driven away even God, and she was lost to Hell and surrounded by demons.
~~~~~
Conroy juiced the accelerator, and the antique black Porsche jumped. The blue sedan speeding in the inside lane fell behind. Testosterone or adrenaline or an opiate neurotransmitter crackled in his spine, riding ionic potentials and cresting down axons.
The sleek black dashboard curved away from the steering wheel and over Leila’s long legs. The Porsche was six years older than she was. Her black hair spilled over the seat like the silk and leather thing she had worn a couple of weeks ago. Pale pink lipstick smudged her upper lip.
He sped along Woolf Road, which led to the University hospital and health science district. “Why are you going back to the lab?”
She scrunched up her coat sleeve and consulted her watch. The dial faced out, for all the world to see. “Some of us have work to do. Must be nice to only work half days.”