Chrysalis has been one of my headache projects since the early 1990s. For those who keep count, version 10 is the published version.
Chrysalis’s original name – at least until we got the cover art – was Recovery Triptych and written shortly after I started my long path to healing. The original version was a bile release and completely necessary.
However, each succeeding rewrite left me wanting. Yes, I needed to get the pain out, but I hadn’t written an interesting story. Ten versions later, I’m satisfied.
Here’s the blurb and my explanatory afterword. Hope you like.
Chrysalis is a story of personal recovery from childhood and adult trauma told in three parts:
The Echo
Welcome to My Sandbox
The Stone in God’s Sling
The Echo
In a bizarre nightmare world, Gerrold is relentlessly attacked by grotesques which thwart his every attempt at escape until an angelic being, Acquiesce, appears and offers him a way out. Acquiesce does not do the work of escape for Gerrold and instead guides him to make his own discoveries about escaping and what it means to be free. With Acquiesce’s help, Gerrold realizes escaping the nightmare means challenging the taking control of the nightmare and robbing it of its power over him.
Welcome to My Sandbox
Freed from his personal hell, Gerrold realizes freedom comes with a price, and the price is to help others escape their personal hells. This means realizing some people would rather remain in their hells, meaning he is powerless to help him. But this confuses him; how can someone recognize they’re in hell and not want to escape?
Acquiesce explains freedom is a choice, that every moment of a person’s life is a matter of choice, and freedom’s responsibilities can be frightening to those not willing to do the work of healing and compassion.
This revelation causes Gerrold to realize some responsibilities are obvious, some are hidden, and now he wonders if he’s fully paid the price of his freedom. He decides to confront the source of his nightmare to learn the truth of it.
The Stone in God’s Sling
Gerrold travels to his nightmare’s source and faces its creator only to discover he has constructed the nightmare himself. Can Gerrold destroy the part of himself which has imprisoned him, set himself free, and heal from the things he’s let happen?
Fans of Guillermo del Toro’s and M. Night Shyamalan’s work will appreciate this dark psychological fantasy which forces the reader to recognize their own hells and offers paths out of them. Read it now and learn if Gerald finally escapes his self-constructed nightmare or succumbs to the doom of his past.
Author’s Afterword
Chrysalis.’’s original title was Recovery Triptych. I wrote the first section in the late 1980s-early 1990s, unnamed, shortly after I began the heavy work of dealing with my own recovery from massive childhood and adult trauma. The original story was pretty much a bile dump on paper. Both powerful and graphic, but not a story. It was me doing the necessary work of getting rid of my rage at what happened to me, and doing it in a way few in my life ever respected but which I felt was my calling; through writing.
I continued the necessary healing work and realized there were more sections. I named the first section The Echo. Welcome to My Sandbox and The Stone in God’s Sling came over the course of several months. At this point in time, I was actively studying how to heal myself and others like me. The research covered several dozen fields and I’m pleased to say many of the methods I developed are now part of the trauma recovery cannon.
I need to state that the third section’s title, The Stone in God’s Sling, is thanks to Alexander Jablokov. He and I were in a Boston-based critique group together and an offhand comment he made about a story he was writing went in deep and stayed, so thank you, Alexander.
The triptych went through ten revisions over the years. I grew uncomfortable with bile extrusion – necessary at the time – because it both confounded the story and didn’t develop it. The resolution in The Stone in God’s Sling never satisfied me. Personally, I think I had neither the writing nor psycho-emotional chops to completely separate the story from my personal history.
I took the story out again earlier this year and read it as a reader and as an editor, constantly asking myself “What’s not working? How can I make it work?”
I asked Northern Lights’ graphics guru, John Scullin, to come up with a cover. His research on the subject and context came up with the butterfly emerging from its cocoon.
That locked it. Chrysalis.
Let me know what you think.
Joseph Carrabis, 6 April 2026, Nashua, NH
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