Don't Forget Me, Bro

Stunned by the death of his mentally ill brother, forty-two-year-old Mark Barr returns to his hometown in West Virginia for his brother’s funeral only to find out that his estranged family has no such plans. Once back home, he discovers that his family’s memory, as well as his own, of his brother as a broken, hopeless schizophrenic is belied by mounting evidence that Steve Barr had lived a much fuller and more complicated life.

Armed with this new knowledge, Mark tears off on a mission to honor his brother’s memory with justice and compassion. As he fights to change the hearts of his father, mother, and middle brother, all of whom are fractured by anger, blame, and dysfunction, his own stability is rocked apart.

In tough, spare, beautiful language that pulls the reader into the peeling, gothic world of southern West Virginia,Don’t Forget Me, Bro shows us that at the heart of every human existence is the ultimate fear of being forgotten, of simply being gone.

JOHN MICHAEL CUMMINGS, born 1963 in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, is an American short story writer and novelist. His short stories have appeared in more than seventy-five literary journals, including North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Chattahoochee Review, The Kenyon Review, and The Iowa Review. Cummings lives in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.