To Walk The Winding Road

Abuse is insidious.

Like a silent serpent, it slithers into your soul, slowly poisoning your emotions until they become warped and blackened. Love becomes something to fear. Trust twists into suspicion. Jealously consumes the heart. Life is no longer something to live with eyes wide open, shining with childish wonder. It is something to slip through with eyes downcast, clinging to the shadows, hoping no one will notice your passage. The hours and minutes of the day are something to escape from, hiding behind the bluriness of booze or twirling colors of mind-numbing drugs. Or, worse yet, something to be ended all together in the ultimate escape.

Be it substance, sexual, physical or emotional, abuse wraps you in a constricting embrace, crushing the hope, the joy â€" and sometimes the life â€" from all it touches. It traps you in a prison from which few escape. For most who live through it, the poison left in their soul often spreads out, affecting all who touch them; turning the abused into the abuser.

1968 â€" A year of violence, war, unrest and fear. King and Kennedy are assassinated. There are riots all across America. Thousands of young American men are killed, maimed and wounded in Viet Nam. Thousands more live in fear of the Draft.

Amid this turbulent time, in Simi Valley, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, a group young people are bonded together by mutual backgrounds of abuse, tragedy and violence. Together, they must learn to break the coils that surround them and forge new futures - or be condemned to a cycle of destruction.

Susan Scott has left behind the beautiful mountains and forests of Mammoth Lakes for the Southern California desert. She’s running from an abusive, drug-addicted lover in hopes of starting a new life with her sister in Simi Valley. She meets a young man who seems too good to be true, but will he turn out to be even more deadly? When her ex-boyfriend follows her to town, telling her to he has cleaned up and changed, will she find the love they used to share or will she find herself once again trapped in a web of lies, drugs and abuse?

Jeff Brooks, the unwanted result of a vicious rape; blamed for the acts of a father he never knew; a martial arts expert in a time when Karate was little known. He comes to Simi Valley to escape the violence of his past, hoping to control the fury in his soul. But when his friends are in danger, will he be able to control the unleashed dragon or will it crush him in its twisting coils?

Al Sinor is in Hell. After moving to Simi Valley from Michigan, his world turns into a cesspool of tragedy. His father becomes depressed and alcoholic, taking out his frustrations on his wife and children, finally blowing a hole in his chest in the front yard. His brother -his best friend â€" gives up his life trying to save another. His mother, unable to cope, buries herself in prescription drugs, leaving him completely alone with his pain and sorrow. Will he follow her into the depths of madness or will the love of a young woman and the guidance of friends save his soul?


This is a story of abuse survival, but also of hope, of love, of redemption