Refusal to Engage: My Voice Is Become Death (A Silence Not So Golden, Volume 1)
No one knows why 8-year-old Randy Zinn begins to lose his ability to communicate. They don’t seem to care, either, opting for scorn, mockery, and bullying, silencing him more. A life of deepening confusion, depression, and isolation has come. Trapped inside his head, he watches hopelessly as life goes by without him, hostility, threats, and harsh judgements from others awaiting any attempt to interact.
Life is no better at school, where he doesn’t understand the assignments everyone else can do, but the teachers don’t believe he needs help. Instead, they decide he’s a troublemaker, doling out punishment and teaching him that seeking assistance will only cause reprisals. Convinced he is stupid and will never be good at anything, he flees into daydreams that his Attention Deficit Disorder makes that much easier to reach. When he’s finally diagnosed as Learning Disabled, it might be too late to save him from himself.
His older brother continues Randy’s plunge into nightmare, grooming him for a kind of intimacy no child should endure. Succumbing to pressure, he begins to question his orientation, a new inhibition causing him to withdraw even further.
The only signs of hope come from a special school that begins to turn his life around, which accelerates when he learns that he’s good at something after all – playing guitar. Armed with a way to express and assert himself, he sets off to find a new life in a world that seems to have no place for him, unaware of the new perils it will bring.
Release Date: 2021