Silent Answers
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Sebastian Costard is a master story teller. His distinctive spare style, adroitly adapted to time, place and character, is neither imitative nor derivative. The fifteen stories included in Silent Answers, his first collection of short fiction, range from the wickedly funny to the poignant to the near outrageous.
Mr. Costard’s treatment of his characters reveals a remarkable insight into the eccentricities of human nature and the universal human condition. How frail and flawed people–the incondite, the down-trodden, the failed, the depraved, and the almost heroic—attempt to cope with their world. Among them the reader will find horrors of drug addiction, mental illness, a tale of rural life in the early years of the 20th century in Beaufort, South Carolina, what goes on in the mind of a predator and other subjects.
As the popular author, Susan Polonus Mucha notes: “… because of his writing, I became engulfed as I immersed myself in each story. Each character was totally different from others I met throughout the book. Obviously Costard observes and understands human nature. Real people, real problems, but not so real solutions. Just like a box of chocolates, I never knew what I was going to get, but I knew from the first story that I would be entertained.
Sebastian Costard, a corresponding member of the Blue Toad Writer’s Group, lives with his wife on a barrier island off the coast of South Carolina. He loves seclusion that affords him uninterrupted time to work on a second collection of short stories and a full length novel, which is entitled The Broken Circle, a work that he will only characterize as fiction woven into approximate history.