The Watchaman

 The Watchaman

Adam is a mentally disabled teenager caught up in the everyday  maelstrom we call life. He cannot speak beyond a few simple words. Most of his  language is made up and known only to him. He possesses a very limited grasp of the past, with even less understanding of the future. Everything exists in the now, and revolves around him. Adam’s family, which is the same as  saying his entire universe, is falling apart. His younger brother and sister  are growing up and changing in ways he cannot comprehend. His parents’ marriage slowly grows cold under strain of a father’s joblessness and alcoholism. Adam is also changing, physically becoming a man, imposing more unrelenting demands and needs upon an already stressed family. The book begins with a short entry from an expecting mother’s journal, full of hope and love for the baby she carries inside. The Watchman ends with a father’s touching connection with his oldest son. The Watchman is an ambitious book by any standard, but Matt Langford took this challenge to a higher level.
The author tells this story exclusively through Adam’s perspective. In doing so, he forces the reader to actively participate and make their own translations of Adam’s world, their own conclusions about the motivations of the “normal” people surrounding him. Langford pulls this off masterfully. With short, simple and brutally effective prose, Langford creates more character development, more humanity, in a few sentences than most authors can create in whole chapters. In only 180 pages Langford boils a family’s existence down to its raw essence.

 

Since deciding some years ago that writing would be a fruitless, difficult career path, and that I should really devote my time to something more sensible (say, accountancy or nursing), I have written several books and dozens of short stories and essentially given myself over to the typewriter at the expense of my hair, my looks and my physique..Demotivation seems to be key here.The problem seems to be, however, that once I write a book a magic unicorn named Bob comes along to edit, rewrite and tidy up my work. Bob has been absent. With this in mind I have spent the last year editing, tidying and rewriting a dozen of my shorts and a couple of my novels.They are now ready for publication. Share and enjoy...The nursing, by the way, is going brilliantly. My young children and my wife are extrememly grateful....
MATT LANGFORD @TWITTER