The opening chapter of my debut novel, THE WHISPER OF FALLING SNOW.
October 2086
The Commissionary of Community Wellbeing, Gregory Stepanov, stepped into his private office bathroom and washed his hands and face for the seventh time that Monday morning. He’d been counting. When he was anxious or feeling bad, he had a habit of counting lots of mostly irrelevant things: the number of books on his shelves—there were forty-nine; the number of trees along the driveway—twenty-one. When things were really bad, he made categories of the things he counted: thirteen novels, twenty anthologies, sixteen collections of Party journals; nine maples, eight spruces, four birches.
What was troubling him today was not irrelevant.
A golden-brown face stared back, its almond-shaped hazel eyes reddened and hollowed from a night of grief and guilt, its normally wavy hair awry. His face, stripped of its beauty.
He wrung his soaped hands under the cold water. A bleak mixture of sleet and snow hissed against the windows.
The language of the Snake.
Gregory Stepanov had had a good man murdered, a man whom he had respected and loved for many years. True, he had extended his life by more than a decade before he signed—had been forced to sign—the recalcitrant old man’s death warrant.
Like Pontius Pilate, “I am guiltless of this man’s death.” Except I’m not, and neither was Pilate.
Stepanov detested the “Sunday Specials,” and there were dozens of them every week. They were strangers, but as he signed their death warrants, Stepanov hated each one of them personally, by name.
By the time they went up the crematory chimney, though, he had forgotten them. Until the next week. And the whole damned process began again. Week after week. Year after year.
Yesterday was different. Yesterday was personal. Yesterday was John Pavlov. No matter how delayed, a betrayal is a betrayal, and Gregory Stepanov knew it
Published by jpaulgordon018
My first novel, The Whisper of Falling Snow, will be published on KDP in ePUB, softcover, and hardcover on July 21. Preorders for the ePUB version are available on Amazon.
In a world shaped by ideology and power, memory becomes an act of resistance—and the cost of forgetting is measured in human lives. Is forgiveness possible? Can love endure?
In the late twenty-first century, the Party of Democracy and Social Justice governs the former United States of America, now reconstituted as the United Federated Districts, through surveillance, ideological conformity, and the quiet administration of death. Gregory Stepanov, a senior Party official tasked with overseeing public wellbeing, has spent decades upholding a system he never truly believed in.
As political tensions deepen within the regime, Stepanov and his closest ally, State Security operative Jeffrey Dane, find themselves increasingly trapped between loyalty and conscience, private devotion and public obedience.
When Stepanov signs the involuntary euthanasia order for his former teacher, John Pavlov, he sets loose a series of crises where memory—and love—become impossible to suppress.
I hold a BA in Soviet and Eastern European Studies and MAs in Theology and History. My background informs the novel’s exploration of authoritarianism, memory, and moral reckoning. I live with my spouse in Clinton, Massachusetts. I am working on the second book in THE WHISPER OF FALLING SNOW series, THE UNSPEAKABLE CITY, which I plan to have out in late 2027
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J Paul Gordon: Literary Speculative Fiction 