Tim Greaton

Spoilers. Free from Kindle. Tim Greaton bills himself as the other author from Maine, but the problem is he doesn't write nearly as well as Stephen King. This is a fantasy book, about a homeless man. He is homeless by his own choice to punish himself for going to work on a Christmas Eve in spite of his wife asking him not to, and then losing her & child in a fire. He decides that he'll take the final step & give himself the death penalty. But then he meets a charitable priest, and a man who claims to be newly homeless himself, and who tells our hero a story about a town way up in Vermont where people kill themselves on Christmas Eve by jumping off a bridge into a raging river. So somehow he manages to get himself to Vermont, mainly due to the kindness of a woman who runs a convenience store where homeless people shop. Everybody at the little town in Vermont is super nice and super welcoming, and when he goes to kill himself he gets stopped by a mysterious figure, who turns out to be a person who came there to kill himself 2 years? or 1 year? before; the mysterious figure tells our hero that the children are waiting for him so of course our hero has to not kill himself and instead go play Santa at the local home for poor/unwanted/sick children...why a tiny tiny town in Northern Vermont has such a home is unclear...and he meets a lovely woman and they prepare to live happily ever after.... So it is not particularly well written and not a story with any life to it.… (mer)