SISTER OF THE LIE
A Novel by Homer L Teabury
AUTHOR
Homer Lester Teabury arrived at his interest in malignant narcissism [1] through his love for a female victim of the disease, whom in a misguided attempt to rescue, he married. Twenty-four months later, homeless and wiped out of everything he ever had—including self-respect, reputation, and profession—he awoke to the fallacy of his abiding faith that malignant narcissism’s inimical roots could be modified with good intentions and honesty. Now he writes about his brush with this rare disorder from a safer distance, albeit always secretly hopefully that someday he will find the means to conquer or master it.
Sister of the Lie is a full-length commercial fiction drawn from Teabury's own experience of the most debilitating coupling in the county—to love and to be loved by a malignant vixen.
OPENING LINES
Single men slept eight to a room at the Dodd County Homeless Shelter, where
my second wife dropped me just three days after our marriage. We had been pronounced man and wife by Judge Morris X. Olden on Friday in the Dodd County Courthouse. My Raebel informed the judge that the courtroom brought back bad memories, and asked if we could please be married in a different part of the courthouse building. Judge Olden got a funny look in his eye and joked (I believe he was joking) that he was in no mood to find any brides in contempt today, so let's just go ahead with the marriage vows, shall we Ms. Tomes?
He seemed to know my Raebel pretty well, and I meant to ask about that. But the notion was lost as we descended the courthouse stairs amidst falling snow as Mr. and Mrs. Robert Reuter—newlyweds deliriously happy about starting a new life together.
That happiness lasted for roughly seventy-two hours, rising and falling and rising again with our luck on the slot machines, but ending when our casino honeymoon ran out of cash. The excitement faded from Raebel's eyes, and all of a sudden she had to get back to Terra right away--because her parents were going to call the sheriff and turn her in for child-neglect. They were always turning her in for one thing or another, or threatening to do so. This time they were tired of babysitting—ergo the child neglect routine. And that is supposedly why she had to drop me off at the Dodd County Homeless Shelter just three days into our marriage.
SUMMARY
SUMMARY
An older husband believes he can save his young wife and step-children from emotional sickness with a stable environment, proper medication, and positive reinforcement. He clings to such rationality even as each new attempt to shepherd his family into a better fold creates misery in his own falling-apart world, until he is overcome by truth in an evil epiphany.
[1] Social psychologist Erich Fromm first coined the term malignant narcissism in 1964, describing it as a "severe mental sickness" representing "the quintessence of evil". He characterized the condition as "the most severe pathology and the root of the most vicious destructiveness and inhumanity".