Works by
Charles J. Frary
(aka Charles Frary)
(Writer)

An Omen in the Bone (2000)
An Omen in the Bone tells three related stories of desire and flight, love and loss.

In Hospital: During the course of one hot summer's day, a man on the run from himself and a needy boy looking for work encounter each other; a tortured seduction ensues which leaves the boy with an unexpected secret and the man poised for further flight.

Cassiopeia's Wheel: The boy becomes obsessed with the house and with the man inside of it. His obsession finally brings him to the door of the house again, only to find the place empty and the man gone. The boy's ensuing distress and confusion precipitate yet another encounter with a stranger: an experience of a far darker kind, this time.

He Drives: The boy now feels driven to confess his homosexuality to his father - a man whose own secret past leads him to treat his son's confession with a cool distance worse than any rejection. When the boy reacts to this by running away from home, the father sets out after him - on a journey towards both the past and the future, and a disturbing encounter all his own.

Son in Homing Flight (2002)
A boy on a bus -- that's taking him back to the small town and the father he'd run away from. "I'm queer,” he'd told his father. More than enough to seal his fate in the house he'd been raised in.

In a city -- and all by himself.

Father Found (2003)
You're a man who listened to your teenage son tell you how he's what you've never been able to admit about yourself: queer. When you punished him with silence, he ran away finally -- to the distant city. You followed -- desperate to find him. Only what you found instead was another boy -- who saw through you right off, and proceeded to act upon it.

In Father Found -- the latest installment of a cycle that already includes An Omen in the Bone and Son in Homing Flight -- Mr. Frary explores the troubled soul of a man fueled by guilt: over a son he might have lost forever and over his desire for a difficult young stranger who just might hold the key to a way -- out.

Intermezzo (2006) -- Nominated, 2006 Lambda Literary Award for Male Fiction
Love conquers all, people say. But when love goes wrong, it can wound and sometimes the wound just will not heal.

A man returns to his old hometown seeking peace. But an unexpected sexual encounter with a teenage boy sends him back to the city he'd fled. Yet he still continues to be haunted by what occurred there. Memories arise-memories long since buried, though never deep enough-of another hometown boy who'd been his first love. It was love of a kind-heated and erratic as the boyish blood behind it-that must leave its mark. Just how much of a mark the man is about to discover during a snowy winter's night of rooting through old things and even older regrets.

Intermezzo, the continuation of "In Hospital" a story that appeared in Mr. Frary's inaugural collection, An Omen in the Bone, further explores a theme central to both works: What happens to a life when the past refuses to stay.past?