Live Caught

Lenny’s out of options. He’s lost his arm to his abusive older brothers, and he’s lost his bearings within his family. Determined not to lose hope, but desperate to escape, Lenny steals a skiff and attempts to ride the rivers from his family’s farm deep in the western North Carolina mountains all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. A torrential storm sinks his boat and delivers him into the hands of a profanity-slinging priest whose illegal drug operation provides food and wages for the local parish. Snared within a power struggle between a crooked cop and the priest, Lenny once again relies on the thinnest shred of hope in his attempt to escape.

Live Caught is a survival adventure which dives deep into the mystifying relationship between hope and choice and examines the peril of remaining in an untenable situation rather than taking that terrifying first step toward change. Lenny takes that step, and then another and another in his journey back toward his abusers and the unlikely prospect of family reconciliation.

R. Cathey Daniels is the author of Live Caught, a novel forthcoming and available for pre-order from Black Lawrence Press. You can also find Daniels at www.rcatheydanielsauthor.com, on The Marvelous Paragraph Project, and read more of her writing at Black Lawrence Press. Daniels grew up in the mountains of Western North Carolina and graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with a master’s degree in education. She taught high school mathematics in East Tennessee prior to becoming an award-winning newspaper reporter for The Oak Ridger, covering education as well as science coming out of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She is a 2016 graduate of the Stanford University Novel Writing Program, won first prize in the 2018 Retreat West First Chapter Competition, was a semi-finalist in the 2020 University of New Orleans Press Novel Contest, and was a semi-finalist in the 2021 North Carolina Writers’ Network Doris Betts Fiction Prize. When she isn’t writing, she can be found at Crossfit, in her garden, hiking, or shooting hoops in her backyard.