Jack Chase’s Made in America: Inheritance, Systems, and the Machinery of American Power
A crime novel on its surface. Beneath it, a testimony to how violence moves through a culture like bloodlines.
This is the canonical, unabridged longform breakdown of my 2025 novel Made in America, first seen on Medium. Major plot events are discussed in thorough detail. View the spoiler-free, condensed version here.
Read the first 53 pages of the novel free.
Published November 9, 2025
Jack Chase | AGP
(Source: Medium) WHEN I SAT down to write Made in America — first as a screenplay in 2021, then again as a novel in 2025 after releasing my debut, Violent Crimes — I wasn’t interested in writing another crime story. The questions the screenplay kept churning out fought the form. In prose, I could let conscience and fate speak in the same sentence without breaking the skin of realism. I set out to tell the truth a script couldn’t hold: how a person’s interior weather collides with a nation’s systems in real time.
Inheritance as Architecture
What I wanted to explore was how violence, corruption, and the hunger for power move through a culture like bloodlines. Not just within families, but in the country itself. The question was: what do we actually hand down when we say “family,” “country,” or “tradition”? Not jewelry or land — those are easy to rationalize — but the invisible things passed to us at birth: systems, debts, moral ledgers.
Made in America tracks that chain of causation: Inheritance as architecture. Not what we’re given, but what we’re born inside of.
Myth and Mechanism
American power runs on two engines: myth and mechanism. Myth is the story a culture tells itself. Mechanism is the machine that makes the story possible. Archer Stone is myth, Zero is mechanism. Together, they form the twin poles of modern power: one sings a legend of bright origins, one quietly grinds people into bills.
One feature of the book refuses to remain metaphor: the Black Stone. Long before Archer became myth, he became impossible. In December 1999, in a Queens butcher shop, Arthur Sullivan — an Irish-Italian hood working for Jimmy Castle — is shot in the face. A black Colombian ruby, used as a paperweight, falls to the floor. Upon Arthur’s blood connecting with it, he reawakes to dismantle the remaining Colombians and return to Jimmy’s [Act IV, Chapter 46]. This singular supernatural intrusion attaches itself not to a prophet but to a man whose survival becomes useful to the machinery he will later serve.
Arthur walked in. Clean-shaven. Brand-new leather jacket. Fresh boots. But something else walked in with him. Something that wore his face but looked through different eyes, something that had learned to see the world through angles and patterns, human interaction translated into questions of distance and force. And at his clavicle, just beneath the smooth skin and that smile he seemed to be trying on for size, hung a black stone — humming where the heart should be, its pulse whispering of change still underway, of chrysalis stages demanding time, patience, and the quiet erasure of whatever could not survive what he was becoming.
Rags would remember this moment for the rest of his life, however long that turned out to be. Would remember the way Arthur moved — like Joey the Blonde, but colder. Eyes different. Like something else had woken up inside him and was still learning how to operate the controls, still discovering what the original owner had left behind and what could be improved through application of principles that hadn’t been available before. Something that would eventually call itself Archer Stone, though Arthur Sullivan had to die first, had to be buried beneath philosophy that transformed human sympathy into operational inefficiency, moral consideration into error.
That anomaly explains everything after. It’s why Archer survives what kills others and why his regeneration is a condition, not a metaphor. The Black Stone is the original grant of immunity, while everyone else pays in blood.
Archer as Myth and Institution
Archer is America mythologized: creation and destruction in one body. Scarred, unkillable, regenerating through blood and conquest. His deteriorating form in the final acts — yellow eyes, black blood, his refusal to die — embodies the country’s condition: prosperous on the surface, rotting within.
Villainy is easy when a character is monstrous on the surface. Archer had to be compelling because complicity rarely wears a mask. He speaks well, can be generous, and looks like the kind of man a city hires to solve problems. Beauty is part of the apparatus. So is competence. He survives because systems prefer men like him to survive. The Stone gives him what institutions give their chosen: immunity from consequence.
Institutions regenerate, absorbing cost, rearranging personnel, and issuing statements to keep going. The narrative treats Archer’s regeneration as a literal intrusion, much like systems treat their chosen men — as if exemption were natural law.
Douglas Morrow: The Sanitization of Evil
While in hiding, Archer assumes the identity of Douglas Morrow, a polished New Jersey investor who bought into Lipton Gaming. IRS agent Kelly Rowan, a former math prodigy, follows the trail of Lipton Gaming’s false filings until she uncovers the rot. Her investigation ends in a casino freezer, where Archer sheds the Morrow mask and traps her with three men.
The Douglas persona shows how easily wealth, courtesy, and refined decorum sanitize evil, even when performative. Wealth, politeness, and community investment are not disguises; they are the evil, packaged as civic virtue. The system celebrates, not punishes, men like Douglas Morrow.
Billy Castle: Predator, Prey, and Pawn
Billy Castle’s life is unlucky, but his real tragedy lies in the list of obligations he never chose.
Early in his life, his father, Jimmy Castle, gives him his only civic education: the ecology of predators — jaguars (elegant, direct) and Komodos (patient, microbial). This is Billy’s first inheritance, teaching him that power expresses itself in two fatal modes: spectacle and infection. The same night, Jimmy is shot three times by a masked man; the novel’s silent implication of the shooter’s identity is glaringly sufficient.
Billy’s entry into Archer’s world is accidental, then inevitable. Working at the Palace, he witnesses Archer execute a rival and is ordered to dispose of the body. This act — his baptism — shows how systems convert witnesses into participants. Billy never volunteers; he occupies the wrong space at the wrong time and becomes operational.
His descent follows mechanical logic. Each task — driving the getaway for Elias’s murder, accompanying Zero for The Panther’s assassination — happens under coercion that turns habitual. The machinery internalizes him.
The system closes in when Billy finds his mother prostituting herself and condemns her. Days later, when ordered by Archer to kill journalist Paul Rogers, Billy hesitates. He then learns his mother overdosed amid his shunning, making the hesitation irrelevant. Rogers’s death [Act II, Chapter 18] marks Billy’s threshold: the moment he stops believing he’s different from the men he serves. Archer later rewards him with a penthouse, converting blood money into literal architecture.
After Archer vanishes following Act III, Billy tries to rebuild: he gets clean, goes straight, and reconciles with Trish, helping raise her son, Nick. Archer’s return drags him into one last mess: a jewelry store robbery secretly meant to recover the Black Stone. Inside, Billy touches the Stone and feels it burn. When Archer executes a young girl at the display case, Billy finally breaks, tackling Archer through glass, refusing to be predator or prey.
Two cops arrive. Archer kills them both, then points the gun at Billy and hesitates — for two heartbeats, the Architect sees himself in his creation. Tobin shouts, Archer flees, and Billy is left amid bodies and diamonds, the system’s remainder: what should have been erased but wasn’t.
He runs for two months as a fugitive with the Black Stone burning against his ribs. The cycle completes when Archer kills Trish searching for him [Act V, Chapter 54]. Leaving Trish’s building, Archer is immediately struck by a car, an intrusion of chance into a world otherwise governed by design. He commandeers the vehicle with a shattered leg and drives to the Dante penthouse he once gifted Billy, not knowing Billy is waiting.
Billy steps from the master bedroom in clean black, a silenced .38 leveled with absolute calm. Archer is wounded, his regenerative power failing. The confrontation unfolds like ritual. Billy drops the Black Stone onto the marble floor, choosing to taunt Archer:
“Go on. Fetch.”
When someone shouts Archer’s name, Billy turns his head for a split-second. Archer takes Billy off the board with a single silenced shot.
Billy Castle’s death results from his final act of hesitation — the belief that eliciting recognition from Archer would restore a sense of moral equilibrium. His impulse to make Archer feel before killing him represents the last residue of his humanism, which proves fatal. Unlike Archer, Billy was never ontologically a killer; his violence was always reactive.
This fatal hesitation mirrors an earlier moment: at seventeen, Billy fails to shoot Vince, Trish’s abusive boyfriend, even when justified [Act II, Chapter 17]. Providence intervenes, and Vince is struck by a truck seconds later. In the novel’s moral architecture, the hesitation that once summoned providence now invites oblivion. When Billy lowers his weapon, no external force balances the scales; the mechanism of fate remains inert. The lesson is brutal: when you have a predator in your sights, pull the trigger. Don’t wait for recognition or stage a performance.
Billy’s tragedy is inheritance fulfilled. He dies trying to escape his father’s taxonomy of predators and becomes both — elegant and direct against Archer; patient and microbial while waiting in the penthouse. The sixtieth floor, elevation mistaken for freedom, becomes his mausoleum. Made in America asks what we inherit when assigned life in America. Billy inherits everything: his father’s violence, his mother’s despair, a taxonomy of survival that offers no salvation. Every attempt at decency is converted into fuel for the machine. He literally dies in the building meant to symbolize his ascent, proving that in a nation built on machinery, even decency becomes combustible material. The system doesn’t punish him; it simply moves on to the next inheritor.
Zero: Evil as a Condition
“Zero,” a brawny Irish hitman inspired by Jimi Stanton’s “Carlo Baxter,” is where myth meets machinery. He’s not the cold monolith one might expect; he tells jokes, will drink with you, and can be almost likable. But following The Panther’s contracted assassination in Malibu [Act II, Chapter 14], he decides to walk back in and massacre the rest of the household — the wife and son, freshly home from basketball practice, and the housemaid — with the ease of shutting off lights [Act II, Chapter 15].
Zero was an experiment in what happens when evil is neither philosophy nor pathology but pure condition, coursing through the veins, unmolested by conscience. Where Archer is the myth justifying the machine, Zero is what the machine produces when it stops pretending. He is cruel because cruelty is him. I wrote him to be unforgettable in the way violence is: not because you want to remember it, but because you can’t forget where you were standing when it happened.
Rags: The Cycle of Regret
Rags functions as the novel’s primary witness to Archer’s transformation from Arthur “Archer” Sullivan to the mythological figure of The Architect/Archer Stone. He offers a crucial intervention point explored through the lens of complicity and moral failure.
He came in an orphan. Irish. Real smart name. Can’t remember. We called him The Kid. Back then he was alright. All-business. Not a drop of humor in him. Guys and I used to say he couldn’t tell a joke to save his life. But he was clean, y’know? Predictable. You handed him a piece, he could hit you blindfolded doing jumping jacks. They called him Archer ’cause of it. Tight hands. Cold aim. Never saw him miss. Jimmy always sent him when he needed something done. Didn’t matter what. Didn’t matter who.
Present at the aftermath of the 1999 butcher shop incident, Rags observes the Black Stone’s emergence and tracks Archer’s subsequent behavioral changes — the obsessive notebooks, the philosophical systems, and the self-mythology the Stone appears to validate.
The Montauk moment, articulated to Trish less than an hour before his death [Act IV, Chapter 44], crystallizes Rags’ structural failure. Standing behind Archer at a cliff edge with a loaded weapon, Rags had the opportunity and means to prevent what followed. His hesitation stemmed from competing loyalties, fear of reprisal, and uncertainty about whether intervention was betrayal or duty. Systems perpetuate themselves through the paralysis of potential actors who might otherwise disrupt their continuity.
And I swear to God, I had the .38 in my coat… Just stood there. Watched his back. He didn’t even turn… Like he knew exactly what I was thinking and wanted to see if I had the stones to do it.
Rags’ confession reveals a pattern of recursive failure. His silence at Montauk repeated when Billy mentioned working for “Mr. Stone” [Act IV, Chapter 44]. Despite recognizing the name and its implications, Rags again chose inaction, rationalized through denial.
Witness without action transforms into active complicity. Rags observes the construction of systemic evil in real time yet selects the path of least resistance at each decision point. His inheritance — the accumulated knowledge of what he could have prevented — becomes inseparable from the violence that follows. Systems cannot self-correct when embedded individuals defer action to avoid personal cost.
Systems of Inheritance Expanded: Kelly Rowan, Tobin Sandoval, and the Maintenance of Power
The machinery of American power requires functionaries, enforcers, and auditors to maintain the fiction of legitimacy. Kelly Rowan, Tobin Sandoval, and Sonny Lipton represent three distinct roles, each inheriting a position in a system that will ultimately consume them.
Kelly Rowan: The Auditor as Believer
Kelly Rowan believes in numbers as divine justice. Daughter of an FBI agent, she inherits not just a vocation but an ideology: that corruption can be caught and that following the money leads to accountability. Her inheritance is faith in the system itself.
Her error: believing discovery equals consequence.
When Archer leads her into the casino freezer, the system reveals its true architecture. The machine allowed her to dig to identify which parts of the operation required cosmetic adjustment. Her demise symbolized that findings without enforcement are just inventory.
Tobin Sandoval: The Cop Who Sold Tomorrow
If Kelly inherits faith, Tobin Sandoval inherits its opposite: the belief that survival requires betrayal.
Tobin’s inheritance begins in Iraq on April 6, 2003 — a war sold on lies and executed by men too young to question orders. While seeking respite from a firefight, he, Archer Stone, and a real New York City police officer named Tobin Sandoval discover $500,000 USD hidden beneath the floorboards of an Iraqi couple’s home. Tensions rise. Archer shoots and kills the couple.
Pandemonium follows. Archer, seeing the money as his, and the real Tobin Sandoval wind up in the crosshairs, leading him (as Esteban “Sticks” Riley) to shoot the real Tobin Sandoval and reap the stolen notes’ fruits with the younger Archer Stone [Act IV, Chapter 34].
“You just killed a New York cop. Now you get to be one.”
Whatever deal Archer offered him — flat percentage, protection, extraction — Tobin accepted it like morphine: knowing the cost, unable to refuse the relief. That acceptance becomes his moral architecture.
By the novel’s present, Tobin/Esteban is hollow. His job is performance; he plants evidence and delivers bodies with detached efficiency. His deterioration is bureaucratic. The scene where he kills his wife by asphyxiation with their newborn in the next room is the novel’s quietest horror. She discovers the truth not through confrontation, but through accumulated suspicion when she uncovers his real military ID with the name Esteban Riley.
Maria’s eyes filled, but she didn’t cry. “Who is Tobin Sandoval? Is he buried somewhere in Baghdad, or did you just decide he didn’t deserve to come home?”
Tobin kills her like deleting a corrupted file: her existence threatens his system. She becomes data that cannot exist.
His execution, following Archer’s massacre of the Manhattan precinct to extract him from custody [Act IV, Chapter 53], completes the cycle. Tobin thought he’d made a deal: his soul for survival. He didn’t understand that the system doesn’t honor deals. It uses you until your usefulness expires, then files you under “resolved.” Archer cuffs him and walks him to the surf because Tobin is a liability that knows too much. The fact that Tobin “can’t swim” [Act I, Chapter 3] is comically irrelevant; he was drowning years ago.
Tobin’s inheritance is the lesson that systems don’t protect their servants — they protect themselves from their servants. Every servant of power who makes a deal inherits the same end: expenditure. You’re not an asset; you’re overhead.
Sonny Lipton: The Debtor Who Never Owned Anything
Atlantic City’s Sonny Lipton is not an enforcer or investigator, but a debtor. His inheritance is the original sin of accepting terms he couldn’t afford to read. The casino he runs isn’t his; Archer funded it when Sonny was desperate. The building is a monument to that transaction. Sonny thought he was taking an investment; he was taking a collar.
“You were already dead the second you took my money,” Archer tells him when he returns to collect [Act III, Chapter 33].
Sonny has been a caretaker, not an owner. By the beginning of Act IV, he’s trapped between the Feds, the Colombians, and Archer, who owns the building, the business, and Sonny himself.
Sonny tries to survive by playing all sides. He sleeps with IRS agent Kelly Rowan and feeds her information, mixing intimacy with intelligence as insurance against prosecution, even while owned by the man she’s investigating. This is the Debtor’s Arithmetic: betray the person who owns you to survive the people investigating them, while praying neither side discovers you’re playing both. The debt is structural, built into the foundation of everything he pretends to own.
Like Tobin with Maria, his death isn’t punishment for betrayal; it’s maintenance. Once Kelly is dead, Sonny is a loose end. His greatest sin was being predictable. The system always knew Sonny would try to sell information to survive.
Debt doesn’t end when you take the money; it begins there. You think you’re buying survival, but you’re buying the permanent condition of owing. The casino was his leash. Sonny Lipton dies because he believed taking Archer’s money was a transaction; it was a transfer of ownership, and he was the asset acquired.
The System as Self-Correction
What ties Kelly, Tobin, and Sonny together is function. Each inherits a role and plays it exactly as designed. Kelly investigates. Tobin enforces. Sonny mediates. All three believe their participation grants them something: justice, survival, or immunity. This is the inheritance the novel tracks: structural position. You inherit your role the moment you start playing it. The machine doesn’t care about your intentions, desperation, or belief that you’re different; it only cares that the work gets done and the ledger stays clean.
Michael Semyon and Tommy Campos: Compromised Authority and Fatal Incompetence
Michael Semyon and Tommy Campos show what happens when the system’s legitimate face meets its criminal arm and both discover they’re equally disposable.
Michael Semyon: The Prosecutor Who Bought Protection
Michael Semyon is hard-on-crime authority incarnate: District Attorney. Archer destroys him not through legal channels, but through a hotel room setup in Act III. Tommy Campos steps from the closet with a camera, Zero appears with a pistol, and the woman is a man. The photos are instant leverage: stay out of the five boroughs or the photos go public.
Semyon’s inheritance is the belief that authority insulates you from consequence. He learns that systems don’t care about title, only utility and vulnerability. The blackmail works because his career depends on the fiction of moral authority.
After the Palace explosion — Madison Avenue leveled, a SWAT team turned to ash — Archer calls Semyon from a rural cabin upstate. One million for the photos. Semyon sends a kill squad instead, revealing his belief that violence outsourced is somehow cleaner than violence done directly. Archer kills all of them in the snowstorm, setting the last to be mauled by a grizzly. Zero dies in the crossfire — loyal, barely acknowledged.
Semyon “wins” as his squad was off-books. But Tommy Campos had the photos all along; Archer never did.
Tommy Campos: The Soldier Who Called His Girlfriend
Tommy Campos has leverage — the Semyon photos — but no strategy besides desperation. He calls Semyon, threatens him, and Semyon agrees to meet.
Then Tommy makes the call that ruins him: he phones his girlfriend, Sara Michaels, a waitress from the Palace. They’d fallen in love where love is possible in that world. She comes because he’s scared. That’s Tommy’s inheritance: the belief that love can survive inside the machine. Once you bring someone into proximity with the operation, they become leverage, collateral.
Semyon sends two men to the hotel, notably Victor. They see Sara. She pulls the revolver Tommy gave her for Christmas — a gift meant to protect her that marks her as a participant — and shoots Victor in the shoulder. Tommy and Sara jump in the car. For a moment, they’re home free. Then a stray bullet, delivered by Victor, punches through the windshield and enters the back of Sarah’s head.
Tommy drives to the district attorney’s building covered in her blood, screaming Semyon’s name in front of a field trip. He’s arrested and goes to prison for life, as the system assumes he killed her. Tommy’s lesson is that the machine doesn’t distinguish between error and intent. His choices — calling her, bringing her near violence — killed her anyway. The system only cares about outcome. Sara dies because Tommy loved her inside a system where love is structural weakness.
The Collision: Authority Meets Incompetence
Semyon and Tommy destroy each other through the logic they live by. Semyon believes violence solves exposure. Tommy believes leverage solves desperation. Both are wrong.
When Archer returns in Act IV, he comes to Semyon’s mansion disguised as a FedEx driver. Semyon signs for the envelope. Inside: a note. Do you know who you’re fucking with? It’s a callback to the blackmail scene. Semyon looks up. Archer shoots him in the face with a silenced pistol.
Archer kills him because Semyon thought he could use the system’s violence without becoming subject to it. His title didn’t protect him; it made him visible. Semyon leaves behind a wife and daughter, though the novel doesn’t linger. Their grief isn’t the point.
Tommy and Semyon share the same delusion: that a version exists where they survive with their leverage, authority, or love intact. The system teaches them otherwise. Their deaths are administrative. The machine identified two parts that outlived their function and removed them. The machine keeps running.
Debt and Erasure as Structural Function: Trish Solomon and Dean Willis
If Archer and Zero embody the engines of American power — myth and mechanism — then Patricia “Trish” Solomon and Special Agent Dean Willis represent the collateral. Both inherit obligations they never chose and negotiate the impossible math of systems designed to extract more than they can give.
Trish: Quiet Resistance in a System That Eats the Careful
Trish’s inheritance is debt in its purest form: she carries the balance for her brother’s schizophrenia, single motherhood, and an economy that makes healthcare a luxury. She is succeeding at an impossible task: staying afloat in water designed to drown her. Her relationship with Billy is structured by this economy; love is a form of accounting where emotional investment is just another debt. Every moment of tenderness is measured against the cost of vulnerability.
Trish’s death is the novel’s moment of reclaimed dignity at terminal cost. When Archer, demanding to know where Billy is, appears in her bedroom, she genuinely doesn’t know [Act V, Chapter 54]. But she makes a choice: she speaks truth to a man immunized from it. She tells him what he can’t bear to hear: that he’s alone, dying, and that Billy was better than him.
“Billy loved my son like he was his own. He was a man. And what are you? You’re just a fucking ghost with a gun.”
For three seconds, something cracks in Archer’s face. Then the gun jumps twice. Trish dies because she refuses to let survival be the only measure of her life. She chooses dignity over breaking even. The system counts that as a loss. The novel counts it as the only victory available.
Dean Willis: The Body That Remembers What the Mind Cannot
Dean Willis enters the novel as amnesia given human form. An FBI agent, he lives around a crater: he drove his wife Sarah and newborn daughter Megan off a bridge in Yonkers while drunk and survived, but has no memory of doing so. That erasure is his inheritance. He feels the guilt but can’t access the footage. The body carries what the mind edits out.
The memory returns at “Grand Central Station” during a seizure-induced hallucination. Archer’s voice comes through the vents, speaking truths Dean buried. The Yonkers crash is revealed as a seizure-length revelation. Dean empties his .38 into the bathroom mirrors because there is nothing else to shoot. Archer is the one who calls 911, identifying him as Dean M. Willis, and telling the dispatcher:
“Tell him it was Arthur.”
He tucks a Polaroid into Dean’s jacket: two boys from the orphanage, one face scratched out, with Isaiah Quince Orphanage written on the back.
Dean and Archer: Orphans and the Theology of Abandonment
The novel ties Dean and Archer together as products of Isaiah Quince orphanage, where kindness exists but cannot scale. They respond to abandonment like believers of two rival faiths.
Archer’s theology is vicious: the system failed him, so its rules don’t apply. Power and detachment become survival strategies. When he finally goes back to see Isaiah decades later, he arrives with a stack of hundreds, calling it help. Isaiah won’t take it. He quotes the line he made Arthur memorize: whoever knows the right thing and refuses to do it, for him it is sin. Archer, who can buy entire city blocks, cannot buy absolution from the one man who fed him.
“I deserve no reward for allowing you to become the way you are.”
Archer attempts to free him:
“You had nothing to do with all this, Z. Actually, you were my hero.”
Isaiah acts as the dig site where the book unearths the boy Archer buried to become Archer Stone.
Dean never gets that scene; his relationship to the orphanage is mediated through forgetting. Where Archer turns “nobody cared about me” into a blank check, Dean turns it into a job description. If the world left him, he will not leave other people. He becomes a federal agent who believes each case file is a chance to tilt the axis back toward fairness. The gun and the badge sour that faith, but he keeps going, doubling down on procedure precisely because he knows how much injustice gets laundered through inaction. That’s Dean’s religion: obligation as penance, service as self-punishment, the hope that if he keeps closing other people’s cases, the universe might quietly close his.
Dean’s Dream (Fall, 2015)
In the months after the main events [Act V, Chapter 58], Dean begins having the dream of the crash again, but it’s different. There’s no snow or black ice; they just pass through the turnpike near Yonkers. The dream functions as negotiation: Dean’s subconscious attempts to rewrite the ledger, searching for a version where the debt doesn’t come due.
Dean’s Walk (Fall, 2017)
Two years later, in 2017, Dean — attending AA, no longer with the bureau — walks his nightly route past The Dante. The building’s Unit 6003 had entered quiet mythology; the elevators stopped at fifty-nine, as if the sixtieth floor had been erased. Yet, every evening at 7:00 PM, the light turns on. A silhouette moves behind the curtain — “too tall, maybe, or too thin, or too still.” [Act V, Chapter 59].
Dean holds the Polaroid of the two boys who started in the same place. He lets it fall. The photograph spirals into the gutter. For the first time in two years, he doesn’t look back to see if the light still burns.
This becomes Dean’s “unexpected absolution.” It’s not forgiveness; it’s exhaustion, but it’s also not defeat. Dean walks away from The Man in the Penthouse because he’s done. He’s spent his life investigating crimes the system allowed, serving a justice that was always selective. The math stays impossible, which is the only absolution the book allows.
The Hauntings: Literal Curses as Structural Truth
The novel’s supernatural elements — the Black Stone, The Man in the Penthouse, the light at 7:00 PM — refuse to be mere metaphor. They are literal because America’s sins are literal. The country is haunted by what it’s done, and that haunting has material force.
The Black Stone is the original sin that establishes the template: power through immunity, regeneration through bloodshed, and systems that protect what should die.
Dean Willis is the counter-haunting. He’s the body that carries consequences the system tried to erase. His amnesia is structural. The system erased the record to preserve the narrative, but Dean survived anyway. He’s the residue.
The Man in the Penthouse embodies the refusal of ordinary witness. You can’t reach the sixtieth floor because some acts can’t be seen directly. You can only see their effects: the light, the silhouette, the feeling that something’s still up there, keeping books. Power operates behind closed doors. The sixtieth floor becomes inaccessible because access is controlled, and control is the point.
The Missing Floor: America’s Only Honest Ending
Ending on Chapter 59 instead of 60 was the last formal choice, and it’s the one honest conclusion the novel could reach. America’s foundational violence can’t be fully witnessed or resolved. The systems that produce men like Archer, grind down people like Billy, erase people like Dean, and starve people like Trish don’t have endings. They have continuations, reforms, and rebrands. They regenerate, just like Archer, because they’re designed to.
Completion would be a lie. Resolving the mystery of the sixtieth floor would suggest that knowing is the same as stopping, that witness equals justice. Kelly Rowan died believing that. The novel refuses to repeat her mistake.
What We Carry Out
I wrote this book angry — not at characters or readers, but at the elegant machinery that makes us complicit in our own diminishment. If the novel does its work, you’ll notice where the bills get passed in your own life. You’ll notice who keeps walking after the shot and who gets stopped for nothing. And you’ll notice how often someone asks you to forgive a debt they benefited from creating.
The Anatomy of Inheritance
Billy Castle is the cost of systems that function exactly as designed.
Archer Stone is the story that keeps the machine holy.
Zero is what the machine looks like when you stop believing in stories.
Trish Solomon is the mirror of resilience.
Tobin Sandoval is the cop who sold his soul and learned too late that souls are expenses, not assets.
Kelly Rowan is the believer who thought discovery equals justice, a mistake the system counts on.
Tommy Campos is the collateral of love.
Michael Semyon is the disposable authority.
Dean Willis is the haunting in human form, the debt that does not stay buried, the man who walked away from the sixtieth floor because standing outside is the only honest position left.
The Man in the Penthouse is the proof we’re not invited to the room where the real decisions are made.
Fifty-nine floors is how close we get.
The novel only asks:
What do you do with that knowledge?
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Made in America: or The Tragedy of Billy Castle and Unexpected Absolution of Dean Willis is now available in hardcover and all formats everywhere books are sold. Pick up the hardcover on Amazon, or spot it on shelves as it begins appearing in bookstores near you.
