The Ghosts Of Morgan Street
The Ghosts of Morgan Street is a psychological thriller inspired by a chat I had with a homeless man in Helsinki, Harri, a gentleman from Finland. He had a life, a job, and a family. After the recession, he could not find anymore a job, and lost the house, giving up to alcoholism.
He lives in the park with other homeless, and when it's too cold, he can ask Police to host him to the jail for the night, at least there he can have a dry place where to stay.
The Ghosts of Morgan Street, far from being a horror tale talking about dead people coming to haunt the night sleep of the living one, are those people living at the margin of the society.
They are homeless, drug addicts, alcoholics, prostitutes.
Some of those come from a traumatic past from which they could not get out, others had a successful life, but recession took from them everything.
BLURB:
In the city of New York, the homeless problem has reached breaking point - but the Governor’s new enrichment program promises to change everything…
When he took shelter in the abandoned house of Morgan Street, Jake entered a close-knit community of the downtrodden and dispossessed, surviving only by selling himself on the street.
Yet now, as winter approaches, the swearing of a new state governor sparks hope, and soon the house’s residents find themselves leaving, one by one, for better lives. As Jake moves into a new home, his friend Patrick, an addict, enters rehab at one of the Governor’s new rehab centers.
But all is not well within the facility walls.
Unexplained disappearances and a terrified message from his friend force Jake and his erstwhile ‘customer’, Chief Detective Ayden of the NYPD, to peer beneath the surface of the Governor’s plans for the homeless people in the rehab facility. It’s only when they find a strange list of crossed-off names that the former residents of Morgan Streets realize they might have been safer out on the streets.
EXCERPT:
Darren turned his gaze to the car's window; the sun was starting to set, and people were talking to each other sitting on old mattresses. Those were the ghosts, invisible, yet too upsetting to be real ghosts.
Some of them looked lazily at him, but it was as if they were not even paying attention, it was as if they were both looking at a far image.
Too far to be even concerned about each other, he thought, “how can it be that we reached this point?” He suddenly wondered.
“We reached it because we focused only on what can gain a profit. We started to put economic growth in front of everything, and we forgot that not everybody can follow the same growth. Therefore, instead of slowing the pace, we figured that there was something wrong with people who cannot walk as fast as the others. They are the cause of their misery, and we all should forget about them. We believed that they are not as useful as people who can run faster and produce more, and that is when we transformed them into ghosts. We taught our children to despise people who are not strong enough to stand the rhythm of industrial production. Everybody has the duty to contribute to the economic growth of the homeland; everybody needs to sacrifice for it. It is not a question of whether you will get anything back from your sacrifice because nothing will be returned. We have indoctrinated our children to produce without asking, to be proud just of the fact of being part of the big machine. We raised perfect slaves, and when slaves cannot perform, we can discard them and forget about them. We convinced ourselves that this is the right way; that is what we have done, Sir.”