Readers and writers blog

Joseph Cigan, 57, is an independent trade contractor in Chicago. He is not a professional writer, but he is a writer. And he has a story to tell.

It is called Sniper in the Mist, and what a story it is.

The first installment — a prelude and first chapter — is presented today in our fiction section at the top right of this page. Just click there on Fiction, then on the title, or go straight through by clicking here.

Yes, the novel is about snipers, but its theme is not war, crime or suspense. It is a story drawn from Cigan’s own life, a story about snipers who threaten not only our bodies but our minds, maybe even our souls, as well.

Cigan was born in Lendava, a small town in northeast Slovenia, when it was still part of Yugoslavia. In the 1950s, his family escaped to Austria and lived for several years in a refugee camp before being allowed through Germany to board a converted troop ship that brought them to the United States. His was among the last families processed through the Ellis Island immigration center.

Since 1957, he has lived in Chicago, and his novel recreates the neighborhoods of his youth — mixtures of Scots-Irish, Eastern European, Latino, Jewish, even Japanese heritage and tough guys with names like Tiger, Babyface and Black Tony.

Like Cigan, the main character of the novel is of Hungarian or Magyar stock, a young man named Varga who at one point muses:

Some of my people were ‘cool in Astrakhan’ . . . though almost always in the crosshairs of a wretched, metaphoric sniper, like Dean Barrera who struggled unsuccessfully with his sanity. . .

Dean was picked off by schizophrenia – his arbitrary assassin.

We will be presenting Sniper in the Mist in installments in our successive Sunday and Thursday postings as we receive chapters from Cigan.

For those of you old enough to remember, novels at one time were commonly serialized in magazines, usually one chapter per weekly or monthly issue. In fact, many of Charles Dickens’ novels were published as serials in 19th century magazines, as were Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories into the 20th century. More recently, Stephen King wrote The Green Mile as a serial.

The difference with Sniper in the Mist — and it is a big difference — is that the novel isn’t yet finished.

But, ah ha, electronic publishing is not the same as print publishing. We can make revisions — everything from small editing, to chapter overhauls, even adding or deleting chapters — without having to go out and recall all the versions in print.

We can do it as we go.

Frankly, we wouldn’t do this for everybody — in fact, not for most writers whose work we see. But all you have to do is read Cigan’s opening lines to realize that he’s not most writers. We’ve seen several subsequent chapters, and we find them just as good as the first.

Even if it takes a long time, we’re willing to wait while this novel is created.

Or not created, if that be the case. If for some reason the novel is never finished — a prospect we doubt — what Cigan has written so far is, in our opinion, well worth reading.

Furthermore, Cigan says he’s open to reaction from readers.

So it will be a collaborative effort: While he writes, we read, we respond, he considers, and who knows what will happen. We think it will be exciting to watch a novel play out before our very eyes.

This is why R&W Blog exists. We are, as we say in the nameplate at the top of this page, an interactive universe of the written word.

So please let us know what you think.

– Sid Leavitt