Jack Chase’s Made in America: Inheritance, Systems, and the Machinery of American Power

This is the canonical, unabridged breakdown of Made in America: or The Tragedy of Billy Castle and Unexpected Absolution of Dean Willis (2025), an American literary crime novel by Jack Chase. Major plot events are discussed. Throughout the essay, certain sections link to full chapter PDFs from the released novel itself for readers who want to move between the analysis and the work it describes.

Read the first three chapters of the novel free.

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. Frankly, I had already tried to do that with the screenplay, but the questions it kept churning out between the lines 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.

1. The Thesis

The novel’s argument is simple: American power behaves like a self-preserving machine. Inheritance isn’t money or trauma but role; myth licenses the machine, mechanism enforces it, and people — operators, auditors, witnesses, collateral — are treated as assets maintained only while they support continuity and erased the moment they threaten it.

2. 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 and therefore deconstruct — but the invisible things passed to us at birth: systems, debts, moral ledgers.

Made in America tracks that chain of causation. Inheritance becomes architecture : a design we inherit rather than possessions we receive. It’s not what we’re given but what we’re born inside of. And once inherited roles calcify into function, the machine determines who gets protected, who gets consumed, and who gets erased.

3. 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. Together, they form the twin poles of modern power: one sings legends of bright origins, the other quietly grinds people into bills.

The Black Stone is the anomaly that fuses them. Archer Stone is the myth it created. Zero is mechanism without the mask. Billy Castle is what the machinery produces when it converts witnesses into operators. Rags is the witness who could have stopped it but didn’t.

3.1. The Black Stone: Origin of Immunity

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 “Archer” Sullivan — an Irish-Italian hood working for Jimmy Castle — is shot in the face during a purportedly routine pickup from three twitchy Colombians. In the struggle, a black Colombian ruby, used by the men 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 the following morning [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.

3.2. Archer Stone: The Architect

Archer is America mythologized: creation and destruction in one body. Scarred, effectively 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 Black Stone gives him what institutions give their chosen: immunity from consequence.

Institutions regenerate. They absorb cost, rearrange personnel, issue statements, and 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.

3.3. Douglas Morrow: The Sanitization of Evil

While in hiding, Archer assumes the identity of Douglas Morrow, a polished New Jersey investor all in on Lipton Gaming. IRS agent Kelly Rowan, a former math prodigy out of Rutgers, 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 inside with three enforcers. The rest is left to the reader to discern.

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.

3.4. Zero: Mechanism Unmasked and Evil as a Condition

“Zero,” a brawny Irish hitman inspired by Jimi Stanton’s portrayal of Carlo Baxter in Your Honor (2020), is where myth meets machinery, though he’s not the cold monolith you might expect. He tells jokes, will drink with you, and at first glance you might even find him slightly endearing. But after carrying out The Panther’s contracted assassination in Malibu [Act II, Chapter 14], something shifts. Instead of leaving with the simple logic of a completed job, he turns back toward the house and walks inside, crossing the line between assignment and appetite. What follows is a massacre of the wife and son who have just come home from basketball practice and the housemaid [Act II, Chapter 15], a rationale-defying atrocity that exposes the mechanism beneath the charm.

Zero watched from across the street, hands resting on the steering wheel. Something shifted behind his eyes — not rage, not fury, but something colder. Deeper. Like a light switch flipping in reverse. The brown of his irises seemed to darken, pupils dilating until color disappeared entirely. Black. Flat. Shark eyes. He blinked once, slow. When his lids lifted, the Zero who had been sitting in that car was gone. What remained was mechanism. Purpose. Like the camera in his head clicked into focus.

Without a word, he reached for the pistol on the passenger seat. No silencer this time. He stepped out slow, deliberate. Blood trailed down his ribcage beneath his sweater, but he didn’t feel it. Salt breeze tugged at his hair as he crossed the street with the gun low, swinging loosely at his side like a carpenter’s hammer.

Zero was an experiment for me as a writer 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 feigning humanity. 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.

3.5. 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 witnessed throughout the main narrative. 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 journaling, the obsessive sketching, and the early evocation of Stonism, a form of Instrumentalist Realism that begins as private doctrine and soon infects the novel’s act cards.

3.5.1. Montauk

The “Montauk moment,” articulated to Trish less than an hour before his death [Act IV, Chapter 44], crystallizes Rags’ structural failure. Standing behind Archer urinating 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.

4. Billy Castle: Inheritor and Remainder

Billy Castle’s life is unlucky, but his real tragedy lies in the list of obligations he never chose.

4.1. The Komodo and Jaguar Taxonomy

Early in his life, his father, Jimmy Castle, gives him the only civic education he’ll ever receive: the ecology of predators — jaguars (elegant, direct) and Komodos (patient, microbial). It’s 2001. This is Billy’s first inheritance, teaching him that power expresses itself in two fatal modes — spectacle and infection — and that both end the same way. Mere hours later, Jimmy is shot three times by a masked man in the neighborhood liquor store. Though never explicitly confirmed, the novel’s silent implication of the shooter’s identity is glaringly sufficient.

In 2014, 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 with Tommy Campos and Elias Belts. 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.

4.2. The Baptism of Participation

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 contemptuous journalist Paul Rogers, Billy hesitates. He then learns his mother overdosed amid his shunning, and the same hesitation is marked null. 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 the explosive Act III, Billy tries to rebuild: he gets clean, ditches The Dante for a two-bedroom, goes straight, and reconciles with Trish, helping raise her son, Nick. Eight months later, Archer’s August homecoming drags him into one last mess: a jewelry store robbery secretly meant to recover the Black Stone [Act IV, Chapter 43], separated from Archer during criminal processing in the third act’s finale. Inside, Billy incidentally stumbles onto the rock, hidden in the back of an unassuming watch case with a note: Do Not Show.

Billy thought of the Forbes profile he’d read the night Archer first pulled him in: Archer in a thousand-dollar suit, the same black stone hanging from a thin chain at his neck beneath a smile too satisfied, too certain, too knowing for any man still playing by the rules. The headline had called him The Architect of New York’s Nightlife Renaissance.

His hand moved without conscious thought, snatching the stone and shoving it into his jacket pocket. The moment his fingers touched it, fire shot through his ring finger, not metaphorical fire, but actual burning pain that made him bite down on his tongue to keep from screaming. The stone felt wrong against his palm. Radioactive. Like holding a piece of something that shouldn’t exist in the same universe as coffee shops and subway rides and people who worried about mortgage payments.

Directly following this beat, Archer — frustrated, unraveling — executes a young girl working the display case. Billy finally breaks, tearing off his mask and tackling Archer through the glass entrance doors.

Two cops introduced just a few chapters prior, Anthony Willis and Jack Amon, arrive while Billy’s getting his licks in on the sidewalk. Archer gets loose, comes up with his .45, and kills them both, then points the gun at Billy and… hesitates. For four 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 stage for their final dance is primed when Archer kills Trish searching for him [Act V, Chapter 54]. Leaving Trish’s building, Archer’s BMW is T-boned at full-speed by an oncoming driver at an intersection — an intrusion of chance into a world otherwise governed by design — after hallucinating his mother, Margaret Ophelia Stone, watching him from the sidewalk. He shoots the other driver and commandeers his vehicle with a shattered leg and drives to the penthouse he once gifted Billy on the sixtieth floor, not knowing Billy is already there and waiting.

“Sixty-five hundred a month and they don’t change the locks.”

As Archer falls into the sofa, Billy steps from the master bedroom in clean black with a silenced .38 leveled. Archer is wounded, his regenerative power failing, and finally, dead to rights. 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 from the corridor, Billy turns his head for a split-second. Archer reaches behind a couch cushion and takes Billy off the board with a single silenced shot.

4.3. The Sixtieth Floor: Predator, Pawn, Paradox

Evidently, 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 meat truck seconds later. In the novel’s moral architecture, the hesitation that once summoned providence now invites oblivion. When Billy trades the killshot for theatrics, no external force balances the scales; the mechanism of fate remains inert. The lesson is simple as it is brutal: when you have a predator in your sights, pull the trigger.

Don’t wait for recognition. It won’t come. Don’t stage a performance. It will be used against you.

Billy Castle succeeds in escaping his father’s taxonomy, but this alignment is precisely what ensures his demise. Jimmy Castle’s archetypes — Komodo and Jaguar — represent the only two viable modes of survival within the machine. When Billy rejects the ruthless action of the Komodo and the elegant viciousness of the Jaguar, he momentarily stands in a morally clean space. He chooses to judge the predator rather than execute it, demanding recognition where only mechanism operates.

Billy dies as a testament to the brutal paradox of this American tragedy: he is consumed by the machine not because he rejected inherited evil, but because he couldn’t fully commit to either embracing or destroying it. In his final moments, Billy reveals himself as neither operative nor revolutionary, but something the machine cannot tolerate: a dissonant asset. The system doesn’t punish him for his goodness but for his indecision. The sixtieth floor — elevation first mistaken for ascent, then freedom — becomes his mausoleum, proving that within this architecture of power, hesitation is the cardinal defect.

5. Functionaries of the Machine: Auditor, Imposter, Debtor

The machinery of American power doesn’t run on titans alone. It requires smaller players who inherit positions within the system, believing themselves operators when they’re actually inventory. Kelly Rowan inherits faith in procedure. Tobin Sandoval inherits someone else’s life. Sonny Lipton inherits a debt disguised as opportunity. All three discover the same lesson: the machine doesn’t maintain them, it maintains itself.

5.1. Kelly Rowan: The Auditor

IRS agent and math genius Kelly Rowan believes numbers are divine justice. Daughter of an FBI agent, she inherits not just a vocation but an ideology: that corruption can be caught, that following the money leads to accountability.

Her error is simpler: believing discovery equals consequence.

When Archer leads her into the casino freezer, the system reveals its architecture. The machine allowed her to dig — not to produce justice, but to identify which parts of the operation required cosmetic adjustment. Findings without enforcement aren’t evidence. They’re inventory. And inventory gets liquidated.

5.2. Tobin Sandoval: The Imposter

If Kelly inherits faith, Tobin Sandoval inherits its opposite: survival through erasure.

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, Archer Stone, a young soldier named Esteban “Sticks” Riley, and a New York City police officer named Tobin Sandoval discover $500,000 USD stuffed beneath the floorboards of an Iraqi couple’s home. Tensions rise. Archer shoots and kills the couple.

Pandemonium ensues. Archer and Tobin wind up in a standoff, leading Esteban “Sticks” Riley to shoot the real Tobin Sandoval [Act IV, Chapter 34].

Archer looks at the body, then at Riley.

“You just killed a New York cop. Now you get to be one.”

By the novel’s present, Tobin/Esteban is rich but hollow. He plants evidence, hijacks rival shipments, and delivers bodies with android-like detachment. The scene where he kills his wife by asphyxiation [Act III, Chapter 19] with their newborn in the next room is the novel’s quietest horror. She discovers the truth not through confrontation, but through accumulated suspicion that coheres into truth when she uncovers his real military ID with the name Esteban Riley while looking for their son’s birth certificate.

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 the way you delete 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, “Eight Empty Desks”], completes the cycle. Tobin thought he’d made a deal: his soul for prosperity. 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 the same way you walk a dog behind the shed.

Systems don’t protect their servants — they protect themselves from their servants. Tobin’s inheritance is the lesson every functionary learns too late: you’re not an asset. You’re overhead.

5.3. Sonny Lipton: The Debtor

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 building is a monument to that transaction: fake marble, plastic gold, and mirrors tilted to flatter men who need flattering. Every surface insists on wealth the books can’t prove. It stands as proof that imitation is its own economy, that even the pathetic can shine if positioned correctly.

“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. He tries to survive by playing all sides: he sleeps with IRS agent Kelly Rowan, feeds her information, mixing intimacy with intelligence as insurance. Betray the man who owns you to survive the people investigating him, and pray neither side discovers you’re playing both.

Like Tobin with Maria, his death isn’t punishment so much as it is janitorial. Once Kelly is eliminated, Sonny is a loose end. In the end, Sonny’s greatest sin was being predictable.

5.4. The System’s Self-Correction In Action

In Archer’s world, inheritance isn’t money or trauma but role. Kelly dies because her competence becomes contamination. Tobin dies because he turns from instrument to hazard. Sonny dies because once he feeds Kelly information, he stops being a manager of risk and becomes a source of it. Each slips, in a different way, out of their assigned groove — Kelly by competence, Tobin by collapse, Sonny by desperation — and the moment a functionary stops functioning cleanly, the machine treats them all the same. It deletes whatever threatens continuity.

6. Authority and Leverage: The Prosecutor and the Blackmailer

Michael Semyon, District Attorney, and Tommy Campos, consigliere within Stone’s syndicate, show what happens when the system’s legitimate face meets its criminal counterpart and both discover they’re equally mortal. Where functionaries like Kelly, Tobin, and Sonny inherit roles they think will protect them, Semyon and Tommy inherit something worse: the conviction that they stand above the machinery they serve.

6.1. Michael Semyon: The Prosecutor’s Delusion

District Attorney Michael Semyon embodies hard-on-crime authority as civic identity. He prosecutes vice, corruption, and organized crime with the zeal of a man who believes the law is a shield rather than a tool. His inheritance is institutional faith: the idea that position confers immunity, that delegated violence carries no moral weight, that a title can insulate action from consequence.

Not long after his election, Archer strikes not through legal channels but through humiliation constructed like architecture. A woman at a hotel bar. Drinks. A room upstairs. Then Tommy Campos steps from the closet with a camera, Zero from the bathroom with a pistol. The “woman” is a man. The setup is complete, and Semyon’s authority, which he believed absolute, becomes the very thing that makes him vulnerable [Act III, Chapter 23].

After fleeing Manhattan and leveling his own nightclub with Dean’s SWAT team trapped inside [Act III, Chapter 24], Archer calls from a rural cabin upstate. One million for the photographs. Semyon’s response reveals his delusion. Instead of negotiating, he sends a kill squad, exposing the hypocrisy that defines him — believing violence outsourced stays clean.

Archer kills all of them in the snowstorm outside the cabin. Zero dies in the crossfire, loyal to the end and barely acknowledged. The bodies freeze where they fall. Semyon’s squad never returns.

His hypocrisy is structural, not personal. He prosecutes organized crime while conspiring with hired killers. He condemns vice while drinking and paying for sex as occupational perks. He casts himself as law’s avatar while treating law as something that applies only to others. His inheritance — the belief that authority exempts him from the systems he enforces — proves as hollow as Sonny’s casino or Tobin’s stolen life.

Archer is arrested in a roadside diner after the forest massacre, cuffed and processed through the same machinery Semyon swore by. For a moment, Semyon has won. The Architect is in custody. The case is airtight. Order restored. Status preserved.

Except Archer never had the photographs.

Enter: Tommy Campos.

6.2. Tommy Campos: Love as Leverage

Tommy Campos knows the play from the start. The Palace is rubble, Archer’s in jailhouse blues, and for once the exit seems clear. Sell the photos, take the money, vanish. He’s got leverage, a target, and for the first time, agency.

He’s also got Sara Michaels.

From a motor lodge, drunk on cheap whiskey and adrenaline, he calls Semyon. Threats. Demands. Hangs up satisfied. Everything’s going fine until he makes the second call.

Sara Michaels worked the floor at The Palace, serving drinks to men who mistook money for charm and attention for affection. She was good at the job because she understood the transaction without internalizing it. When Tommy started coming around, she recognized him as different. Not good, necessarily, but present. He saw her as more than function, which in that economy qualified as romance.

This becomes Tommy’s inheritance: the belief that love can exist inside the machine without being subject to its operational logic. That intimacy can be carved out as a separate sphere, immune to the violence and calculation that govern everything else. That a man who facilitates blackmail, traffics in narcotics, and arranges disappearances can somehow protect the one thing that matters by keeping it close.

He calls her from the motor lodge. He tells her to pack. He tells her they’re leaving tonight. He tells her he loves her, and he means it.

Two men arrive. They see Sara. She pulls the revolver Tommy gave her for Christmas, a gift meant to protect her that instead flags her as a participant. When she fires — hitting one man in the shoulder — the rules shift, and she becomes operational. They jump in Tommy’s car. For thirty seconds, they’re free. Then a stray round punches through the rear windshield, travels the length of the interior, and enters the back of Sara’s head.

In a laconic state, Tommy drives to the district attorney’s building covered in her blood, exits the vehicle, and begins screaming Semyon’s name in front of a middle school field trip. Lobby security tackles him. Police arrive. He’s arrested on the spot. The photographs are found in the glovebox. He’s charged with Sara’s murder — not because he pulled the trigger, but because the system requires someone to carry the cost. Tommy’s choices placed her in proximity to violence. The machine doesn’t distinguish between intent and outcome. Causation is causation.

Tommy’s lesson is simpler than he could’ve imagined: the machine doesn’t recognize love as exemption. It recognizes love as leverage, and leverage as vulnerability. Sara dies because Tommy believed affection could be insulated from function, that he could operate inside the system while protecting something outside it. But there isn’t an outside. There’s only the machine and it’s appetite. Love, in this architecture, isn’t refuge — it’s structural weakness waiting to be exploited.

6.3. The Illusion of Exceptionalism

Semyon and Tommy exist on opposite sides of law’s mythology, but they share the same flaw: believing they’re exceptions. Semyon thinks his office lifts him above the violence he authorizes. Tommy thinks love gives him sanctuary. Neither survives their faith.

When Archer returns to New York in Act IV, he goes to Semyon’s gated estate dressed as a bearded courier. The bell rings. Semyon, irritated, answers himself, unaware his protective detail has transcended already. Inside the envelope is a single note, a callback to the original blackmail scene. Do you know who you’re fucking with? Our counselor realizes, far too late, that the answer is “Yes.” When he looks up, Archer’s already pulling the trigger.

Semyon dies because he believed authority could shield him from the violence it commands. His title didn’t protect him; it made him visible. Authority, like love, doesn’t immunize, it exposes. In a system where visibility equals vulnerability, Semyon’s status was never armor. It was a spotlight.

The system doesn’t argue with exceptionalism. It deletes it. Functionaries who imagine they stand outside its logic aren’t “punished” for arrogance, they’re erased for inefficiency. The machine doesn’t care why you broke protocol, only that you did.

Semyon and Tommy inherit the same truth every operator in breach learns too late: the machine doesn’t have favorites. It has functions. Once you stop functioning cleanly — once you start believing you’re exempt — you’re no longer an asset. You’re interference.

And interference gets purged.

7. 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.

7.1. Trish: Warrior

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’s 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 long 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 a fucking ghost with a gun.”

For three seconds, something cracks in Archer’s face. Then the gun jumps twice. Her body hits the floor.

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.

7.2. Dean Willis: Survivor

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 mercifully filters.

The memory returns at “Grand Central Station” during a seizure-induced hallucination [Act IV, Chapter 51]. Archer’s voice comes through the vents of a men’s room from another time, speaking truths Dean’s mind has buried. The Yonkers crash is revealed as a seizure-length revelation. Dean empties his .38 into the bathroom mirrors, and the room collapses.

Dean wakes convulsing on the street outside Grand Central, mouth foaming, bottle smashed, pistol nearby, reality reasserting itself as cold concrete and the taste of blood on his tongue. When his vision steadies, someone is standing over him — not quite an enemy, not remotely an ally, and somehow nowhere near in between.

7.2.1. Recognition

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.

And then he’s gone.

8. Dean and Archer: Orphans and the Theology of Abandonment

The novel ties Dean and Archer together as products of Isaiah Quince Orphanage, a place where love exists but cannot scale. They respond to abandonment like righteous believers of two rival faiths.

8.1. Archer and Isaiah in the Orphanage (August, 2015)

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 [Act IV, Chapter 40], he arrives with a stack of hundreds, calling it help. Isaiah won’t take it. He quotes a passage from a famous book he forced Archer to read cover-to-cover at thirteen: 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 someday quietly close his.

8.2. Dean’s Dream (Fall, 2015)

In the months after the conclusion of the main narrative [Act V, Chapter 58], Dean begins having the dream of the crash again, but it’s different this time. 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.

“I’m driving. Sarah’s in the passenger seat, Megan in the back. I’m watching her in the mirror. Eyes all wide. Smiling. Making that sound she used to make. Half laugh, half squeal.” He rubbed his palm against the table. “But it ain’t like the one before. There’s no snow. Just clear road. No ice. No storm. At first I thought maybe that was the truth I’d forgotten. That maybe it never snowed at all.

Then the flakes come. First a few on the glass. Then more. Then the kind you can’t see through. The wipers can’t keep up. And I know it isn’t real. I know they’re not there. But I keep my hands on the wheel. I don’t stop. We reach the turnpike. The one near Yonkers. But nothing happens. We just pass through…

… And maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s the gift of it. That in some corner of it all, I get them back. Sarah safe beside me. Megan laughing in the back. The road clear. Nothing happens.

We’re together. Sarah and I don’t say a word. We don’t need to. And it’s just that. So for as long as I’m able, that’s what I do. I just keep driving.”

8.3. 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 sixtieth floor has been nonoperational since Ryan Channing and the forensic team wrapped the crime scene in 2015.

The Dante stood sixty stories of money and shadow over Manhattan, glass and steel catching the dying light. Unit 6003 had entered the city’s quiet mythology. Everyone had a version of what went on up there. The one with the red glass, curtain always a few inches open like a dead eye that never fully closed. The doorman swore it had been empty since 2015, wiring shut off, utilities disconnected. And the elevators didn’t even rise to sixty anymore. They stopped at fifty-nine, as if the sixtieth floor wasn’t there at all, like it had been erased from the world.

Dean holds the Polaroid of the two boys who started in the same place — one clear, the other scratched out.

Finally, 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.

Here are the final words of the novel:

He walked home through streets that breathed with eight million stories, most of them ending in forgiveness that came too late or mercy that arrived disguised as something else entirely. Behind him, sixty floors above, something that might once have been human maintained its own vigil, keeping its own books, paying interest on debts that accumulated until the end of time.

But that was no longer Dean’s contract to honor.

The city breathed around him, inhaling suffering and exhaling possibility, while somewhere in the distance, church bells marked another hour in the long conversation between what was owed and what could finally be forgiven.

9. 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.

10. The Missing Floor: America’s Only Honest Ending

Ending on Chapter 59 instead of 60 was the last formal choice I made, 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. Ending on the sixtieth floor would imply that seeing equals understanding, that witnessing equals intervention. But in this architecture, knowledge alone changes nothing — a lesson Kelly Rowan never learned. By stopping at fifty-nine floors, the novel enacts the structural limits of power itself.

11. 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.

12. The Anatomy of Inheritance

And its ghosts, living or dead.

Billy Castle is the combustible cost of inherited decency.

Archer Stone is the system’s immortal spokesman.

The Black Stone is the myth’s life support, as well as its architect—a kind of black magic rendered in a contemporary key through the lens of classic fatalism. It chooses perpetuation, sustaining the machine through Archer because the system cannot fail while it can survive.

Zero is what the machine looks like when it stops feigning humanity.

Trish Solomon is the mirror of resilience.

Tobin Sandoval/Esteban Riley is the faithful servant who learned too late that loyalty isn’t entitled to reciprocity.

Kelly Rowan is the auditor who mistook discovery for consequence.

Tommy Campos is love rendered collateral.

Michael Semyon is the prosecutor of vices he himself consumed.

Dean Willis stands as America’s haunting in human form, our last man standing: the moral residue of systemic violence, the debt that outlives erasure. Walking away from the sixtieth floor, he claims the one act of free will his life allows — a recognition that some contracts cannot be honored, some debts cannot be paid, and sometimes, the only sound — even ethical — choice is to abandon them. Sometimes, all we can do is just keep driving.

The Man in the Penthouse is proof the real country operates at an altitude so inaccessible that democracy itself becomes irony. Freedom becomes the quiet acceptance of undisclosed terms.

Fifty-nine floors is how close we get.

The novel only asks:

What do you do with that knowledge?

— Jack Chase

Made in America: or The Tragedy of Billy Castle and Unexpected Absolution of Dean Willis (Abbycat Group / California / 2025) 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. -AGP

© 2025 Jack Chase. All rights reserved. Published by Abbycat Group, an imprint of Abbycat Group LLC, operating under Abbycat Group & Publishing Brands (AGP™).