MARBLEHEAD — The picturesque coast of the North Shore can feel like the perfect backdrop for timeless stories of life in New England.
For author Steven M. Rubin, the North Shore is the backdrop for his upcoming psychological family drama “The Unravelling of Michael Galler,” a coming-of-age story about a man in a transitional period of his life.
Rubin, a North Shore native, has been working on “The Unravelling of Michael Galler” since approximately 1996 and became familiar with the North Shore communities of Marblehead and Swampscott while playing football at Winthrop High School.
While living in Swampscott, Rubin submitted chapter four of the work-in-progress novel to the 1997 Marblehead Festival of Arts, where he won Adult Short Story Best of Show.
“It was certainly good validation to have entered and won Best of Show, which surprised me,” he said. “But I think that was validation of two things: One, that I had a story to tell, even though I only shared a small part of it in the Festival of Arts, but also that I had the ability to tell it, and I think that may have definitely been a part of propelling me forward.”
He added, “You never know where something you created a long time ago might end up.”
Rubin said the novel is about a young man, Michael Galler, living on the North Shore at a transformative time in his life — a time between high school and college — where “based on observing a lot of illnesses from people that were close to him, he’s gained a heightened awareness of cancer, and he has an obsessive fear of of getting cancer. But to him, cancer really could come in any type of illness form. It’s anything that has the potential to grow inside you without you knowing it, any kind of physical illness or effect, and that has an overpowering effect on him.”
Galler dedicates himself to protecting himself from any similar ailment in the novel.
Rubin said he does not explicitly state where on the North Shore the story takes place; however, the location is set in the suburbs and in the city of Boston.
Rubin said there is a moment in the novel where the main character, Michael, “does take a drive up the coast, and I specifically mentioned him ducking into Marblehead Neck to get a view of the water in there.”
“The Unravelling of Michael Galler” will be released on May 12 and is available for pre-order on Amazon and at Barnes & Noble. It will also be available at other major and local bookstores.
