Bud thought he could outgrow Camp Creek. He thought adulthood meant distance, that silence was safety, and that the house on the lake was just another parcel to be sold. But when he returns with his sons—divorced, dislocated, and morally exhausted—he finds that the past hasn’t collapsed under the weight of time. It’s calcified. And it’s waiting.

At the heart of this novel is a myth—a Dragon, invented by a boy who didn’t know how to process abandonment. That boy is now a father, and the Dragon has grown with him. The Prince of Camp Creek is not a tale of redemption. It is a forensic audit of memory, told across five movements that blur fact and myth, guilt and grace, memory and manipulation.

Evelyn, the mother who left. Mama B, the matriarch who lied. Armond, the half-brother who stayed behind in every sense. And Rose, the sharp-tongued oracle of the town’s unsaid things. Together, they orbit Bud’s unraveling like moons made of inheritance and resentment.

Told in a voice that veers between brutal honesty and lyric restraint, this novel dissects the architecture of family—especially the kind built on omissions. It wrestles with what it means to raise children when you were never properly raised, and what it costs to build something new on top of land soaked in secrets.

This is not a story of triumph. It is a story of participation.

Because sometimes the only way to reclaim a legacy is to rewrite it.