Charles

The last sound Charles remembers is the tick of a clock. The next will be the hum of the electric chair. They called him a killer. A monster. A curse. But are monsters born-or are they made?

Charles entered the world in a prison cell; his mother's death sentence carried out just hours later. From there, life sharpened its knives on him: foster homes that broke him, men who taught him pain, a town that fed him rage.

Now, at age 30 and strapped to the electric chair, Charles begins to feel time unravel. He is pulled backwards into the darkest memories of his mind. He cannot control this pull. Something is happening.

The clock ticks again, but this tick is not the same. It's loud; seemingly booming from everywhere and nowhere at once-and it is backwards; the echo rolling in first followed by a hit. Every backward tick peels away the lies, the blood, the judgment.

When the spiral turns forward again, redemption and revenge will walk hand in hand.

By age thirteen, the river whispered his name, and an old woman placed destiny in his hands. When the clock strikes again, the question will remain: Was Charles ever the villain-or the only soul brave enough to fight fate?

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CHARLES is a ferocious, time-shattered descent into guilt, silence, and manufactured evil. It marries the intimate brutality of Child of God with the procedural dread of The Green Mile, yet lands as its own beast: mythic, sensory, and relentlessly corporeal. The watch motif binds a nonlinear life into an inexorable ritual that asks whether monstrosity is born, made, or narrated into being