The Door Stayed Open

Some children are punished for what they do.

Mick Brennan is punished for being born.

The oldest of six children in a devout Catholic family, Mick grows up hearing that he is evil, unlovable, and responsible for the shame surrounding his birth. While his brothers and sisters receive birthday cakes and Christmas presents, Mick is locked in closets and dark rooms. His only sense of worth comes from protecting the younger children, excelling at football and wrestling, and loving Laura Harlan.

Then Laura becomes pregnant.

Desperate to save their unborn child from two controlling families, Mick commits a betrayal he cannot undo. Although the stolen money is recovered, his parents use his probation and growing anger to send him to Calder State School for Boys, a prisonlike institution where cruelty is currency and fear can keep a boy alive.

Convinced that everyone was right about him, Mick becomes the monster they always claimed he was.

But when violence begins reaching the people he once tried to protect, Mick must confront a harder truth: what happened to him explains his anger, but it cannot excuse what he chooses to become.

Set in small-town Iowa during the 1970s and 1980s, The Door Stayed Open is a powerful literary novel about family shame, first love, institutional confinement, fatherhood, and one man's struggle to end an inheritance of cruelty.