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What Gods Would Be Theirs?

A Novel

Preston Wiley is a spoiled rich kid with a boathouse and a sailing yacht. But amid the outrageous parties and fast-paced life of his senior year, he awakes into a new world of ideas and free expression and is forced to choose between the opposing viewpoints of two powerful mentors.

Teachers are not supposed to have feelings and opinions. But Laird Hardin is a thirty-three-year-old ex-fighter jock who is struggling at the breaking point in his self-sacrificial roles of father, teacher, and husband. From deep within the throes of a midlife crisis, he tries to reignite his youth with drugs, prostitutes, and ultimately with the most forbidden fruit of all. Meanwhile, Gavin McBride is a former Peace Corps worker who is just settling into his first stateside teaching position. Gavin is a twenty-six-year-old antitheist on a mission to save the world with a series of YouTube monologues that take on the government and organized religion. But when he offends his community’s political and religious elite, powerful forces align against him.

What Gods Would Be Theirs? is a literary novel that takes place on the northern shore of Lake Travis in a wealthy suburb of Austin, Texas. It is a fast-moving story about love, loss, the human appetite, and our search for meaning in a chaotic world.

Purchase What Gods Would Be Theirs?

Hardback ISBN – 978-0-9829895-7-9
Paperback ISBN – 978-0-9829895-9-3
eBook ISBN – 978-0-9829895-8-6

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Critical Reviews

Simply put, this is a great novel. I know almost nothing about Colin Shanafelt and yet I put this book beside such greats as Henry Miller, Thomas Wolfe, Tom Robbins, Vonnegut and Mailer, Heller and Pirsig. In other words, a compelling novel of ideas, embodied in passionate characters grappling with their destinies in archetypal relationships. The narrative is woven in a schoolboy’s tale, Salingeresque in its direct simplicity. The ideas are those of hero Gavin McBride, who delivers stunning monologues of eloquence, power, and relevance to today’s political stage – in front of his high-school English class, in bar conversation with his foil Laird Hardin, finally on YouTube, and from the very rooftop of the institution, megaphone in hand. This is a novel for our time of challenged truth, dangerous polarities, fundamental blindnesses. Yet in these respects too the theme is timeless, a call to real belief worthy of the eloquent speakers and writers of the ages, from Plato to . . . well, may I recommend Colin Shanafelt.

Nowick Gray - Alternative Culture Magazine

It is the 2005-06 school year at Northlake High School, which serves the posh suburb of Pinot Bay, near Austin, Texas. When Preston Wiley is not out on sprawling Lake Travis on his father’s thirty-seven-foot yacht, The Ion, or partying with his classmates, he attends Northlake. But this year, the bored and somewhat jaded Preston is experiencing an unprecedented inner alertness. By some twist of fate he is taking two English classes, with two very gifted teachers. American Lit is led by a new teacher, Gavin McBride, a passionate idealist, a poet, and ex-Peace Corps veteran with a social change agenda; McBride is a true believer, not in religion but in books and ideas and the pursuit of truth. He sometimes strums an old Gibson hollow-body guitar when he is not lecturing. Preston’s British Lit class is taught by Laird Hardin, a married Air Force vet with a child whose personal philosophy resembles that of a character in a Cormac McCarthy novel, who believes that our random, apathetic universe is “a puppet show where the puppets are controlled by puppets, who themselves are controlled by more puppets . . .” Hardin claims not to be suited for a life of family ties or the workaday world. He wants another kind of life—of pleasure in the moment. “I was born to feel,” he says. Both teachers, however gifted, are on the bubble. McBride is risking his career by putting his message on YouTube. Hardin, meanwhile, has become dangerously friendly with a female student. And Preston is the attentive witness.

The tension between McBride’s pursuit of the good and Hardin’s amoral cynicism is as integral to Colin Shanafelt’s literary novel, his first, as Lake Travis is integral to his setting. Shanafelt plays out opposing metaphysical positions by characterizing and plotting them, and by adding organized religion, “those infected with knowing,” as McBride argues, into the fray. The drama is made all the more compelling by Preston’s musing on his pivotal year that began when he “already knew everything” and ended with him knowing only a little something about knowing.

Shanafelt taught high school in Austin at about the time his story takes place, and he now teaches English at Austin Community College. What Gods is the kind of novel that will do for readers what it did for its narrator, Preston. It will sharpen their moral sensitivities as it asks them to consider their beliefs.

Joe Taylor - ForeWord Reviews

Literary Analysis & Essay Writing Guide

We are pleased to announce the publication of our latest book, Literary Analysis & Essay Writing Guide.

The book is available on Amazon.com in both paperback and kindle editions. ISBN-13: 978-0982989531

From the Back Cover:
Literary Analysis & Essay Writing Guide is an essential reference tool for anyone studying literature or writing an essay in high school or college. Whether preparing for your Advanced Placement (AP) English Literature and Composition exam or writing a paper for a graduate-level literature course, Literary Analysis & Essay Writing Guide will help you on your way.

By arranging the elements of composition and literature graphically around several wheels, teachers and students are better able to visualize how the elements of literature develop style, coherence, and meaning. Flip to the corresponding page of any element to find a detailed definition of the term, several examples, factors to consider, and additional questions to ask about how that device functions in the literature or composition at hand. The guide also contains sections for figures of speech and mechanics where the proper conventions of English are fully explained and illustrated.

Literary Analysis & Essay Writing Guide was written by a college English professor with extensive secondary experience and is appropriate for all levels from secondary through graduate-level university academics.

One Thing Right

One Thing Right is the endearing tale of a Texas rancher with a flare for poetry and drama. He sees a decaying ship being used as an ornament in front of a seafood restaurant and is offended that such a wonderful relic would be condemned to that sort of fate. So he buys the vessel and repairs it just enough for one last voyage.

After assigning ranks and positions to each of the neighborhood boys (including his own son), the Captain and his rag-tag crew row the ship to the center of a small lake and give her the burial she deserves.

One Thing Right is a children’s picture book published on March 28, 2011, by Gatsby’s Light Publications in Austin, Texas. It was written by Colin Shanafelt and illustrated by Jeff Thompson. The book is available in print from Amazon.com and as an iPad/iPhone App on Apple’s App Store.

iPhone / iPad App
ISBN – 978-0-9829895-1-7

Paperback
ISBN – 978-0-9829895-2-4