The Appearance of a Hero—The Tom Mahoney Stories

Tom Mahoney is the golden boy everyone knew in school: good-looking, charming, an athlete---sought after by women, the envy of men. His success in life seems a foregone conclusion. In The Appearance of a Hero, Tom navigates the passage into adulthood, his story chronicled from every perspective but his own.

Tom crisscrosses the country in search of direction, affecting the lives of everyone he meets. The recounting of his illicit affair with an older colleague reveals a young man unprepared for the emotional entanglements that come with love. Tom’s father, Stuart, struggles to reconcile Tom’s splendor with his shortcomings, as he watches his only child fail to live up to expectations. A young couple befriends an unsuspecting Tom, attempting to extract the very qualities others find so alluring about him. For an aging tennis partner, Tom serves as a lens through which the man is able to understand his early years of fatherhood. A girlfriend, enamored by Tom, attempts to isolate him, with shocking consequences.

As the mythology surrounding Tom grows richer, Tom struggles to understand what exactly has eluded him, and in stories that grow increasingly desperate and heartbreaking, we begin to see that being an icon is not all it’s cracked up to be. In this haunting short story collection, Peter Levine offers a portrait of a hero for the twenty-first century, a man whose legend is constructed not by himself but by those around him, all desperate for someone to idolize.

PETER LEVINE earned his M.F.A. from The Writing Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, StoryQuarterly, and elsewhere. He has held residencies at Yaddo and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He lives in Washington, D.C.