*Next Generation Indie Book Awards 2025 First Place Winner*
What does it mean to be different?
When Johnny Cruel is born with strange appendages on his back in the 1930s South, the locals think he's a devil. Determined to protect him, his mother fakes his death, and they flee. Thus begins Johnny's yearslong struggle to find a place he belongs.
From a turpentine camp of former slaves to a freak show run by a dwarf who calls herself Tiny Tot and on to the Florida capitol building, Johnny finds himself working alongside other outcasts, struggling to answer the question of his existence. Is he a horror, a wonder, or an angel? Should he hide himself to live his life?
Following Johnny's journey through love, betrayal, heartbreak, and several murders, Boy With Wings is a story of the sacrifices and freedom inherent in making one's own special way-and of love and the miracles that give our lives meaning.
✧ Praise for Boy with Wings ✧
'A brilliant fever dream of a novel, a haunting coming of age story reminiscent of both Franz Kafka and Charles Dickens.'
~ Chris Bohjalian, #1 New York Times bestselling author
of The Jackal's Mistress
✧ Excerpt ✧
(from Ch. 11, when Johnny first appears on the show)
“Ready?”
His heart lurches. Is it time? He struggles up, a man led to his hanging, clad in this silly costume, an oddness and spectacle shown now to the crowd. A shocking freak. Sheila leads him back behind the tents, where the air is cooler and a grass smell clings, into another tent not unlike her own, in which a platform has been erected with a rail placed in front. Across from this sits a single chair. One side of the tent is open, perhaps to admit more light and air, though the tent remains shadowed and gloomy. A string of bulbs across its top shine like distant, tiny stars.
“Hear her?”
And he does—Tot’s voice is beyond them, sailing and prodding and pitching and selling, calling him the greatest and oddest, the most splendid and the truly strange. He stares down at his shoes, his nose dripping, his tongue grown extra large. His heart thumps like a hammer’s heavy fall. Sheila nudges him once, her face and arms even brighter than before, a tattoo behind her ear of a dog howling made clearer. She gives him a slow, hopeful wink.
“You got it, boy. All you do is walk in, stare at the men for a minute, sit down in the chair, and when Tot tells you, turn around and take the cape off. You stand there for a minute or two, walk up and down so that everyone can get a good view, and then it’s done! Walk on off and we eat some candy. How’s that sound?”
He shrugs and tries smiling. The sick feeling from before has found its way to his belly, and he’s left with the idea of crapping now in his cape, of showing that to the audience, and the thought makes him laugh and shriek. Sheila frowns and claws his arm, attempting to put a stop to this.
“Hush now! They’ll hear you! You don’t want to spoil the show.”
Her grip digs and hurts him, his giggling brought up short, and he spins himself to her in a twist that makes her slump and fall. She lands on her back surprised, her own rage quick and dulled in her face, her eyes sharp. Her teeth look like rocks. Tot is suddenly behind her.
“You ready? What are you doing?”
His breath is short, his fists balled and sweat running, and he’s thinking of the time the men beat him so badly that he couldn’t walk, after he’d snapped at a paying guest. Tot raps on his knee for attention.
“Get behind the curtain—they’re coming in!”
And so they are, a shuffling line of rumpled men, three or six or ten of them before he is pulled back from their view. Again he is warm-faced, whirling once more when Tot’s voice breaks and launches, amplified somehow like a god’s: “And here he is, gentlemen, that oddity from another land, that one of a kind, one in ten million, born to an unknown mother, a gift straight from the clouds. Please welcome the one and only Johnny C—the boy with wings!”
Muttering and a few handclaps, and he finds himself suddenly inside the tent, the cape on his shoulders and falling down his back. Maybe Sheila had pushed him, or Tot has simply willed it, but he walks out as they told him, sitting and then striding from one end of the rail to the other, at first not looking but then looking at each of them, one after one after one. He flourishes his cape, then turns his back to them and sits again in the chair. A murmur rises, different in tone from only minutes before this, a few words breaking: “. . . where is . . .?” “. . . some fraud . . .” “. . . back in Toledo . . .”
Again, Tot’s voice squeaks. She’s standing next to him somehow, peering and holding a small oil lamp. “Now, the moment you’ve waited for. Be prepared, as even grown men have been known to faint.” She pauses. “Don’t tell your wives about this. Don’t tell your children. Don’t tell anyone.” Another pause. “He’s a living, breathing monstrosity. Here he is—Johnny Cruel!”
He rises and, keeping his back to them, slowly drops the cape. Off his shoulders, exposing his side, over the hump on his back and with a rush the cape falls, lying then twisted and shapeless on the ground just below. A hiss sounds behind him, new grunts and shifts. A few cries: “What the . . .?” “. . . can’t be . . .” “. . . just putty, right?” “…sticking it on that boy . . .”
He stands there for a minute or two, tears dripping down his face, walks to one side and then the other before wrapping the cape back over his shoulders, turning and striding past them and out. Sheila is behind the tent’s wall, her eyes alive with excitement, their near fight forgotten, and he sees others watching: Zorat, Kenneth, Alfred, a few others unknown. One blonde-haired girl, a look of surprise or maybe confusion on her face, as if none of this makes even the slightest sense. He wipes at his eyes and walks on past them all.
“How’d it go?” Sheila asks him. She’s almost jumping up and down.
His breath is calm. He squints up at the sky, the dried salt on his face cracking and his neck bent beneath this, fighting an impulse to laugh or to hug her. The stars form different shapes like white ink. He pulls the cape tight, feeling it catch on his wings—for isn’t that what they are? Looking out at her now, he gestures outward and shrugs. Turns his palms up. Smiles. “It was fine, I think.”
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Mark Mustian
Mark Mustian is the author of the novels "The Return" and "The Gendarme", the latter a finalist for the Dayton International Literary Peace Prize and shortlisted for the Saroyan International Award for Writing. It won the Florida Gold Book Award for Fiction and has been published in ten languages.
The founder of the Word of South Festival of Literature and Music in Tallahassee, Florida, his new novel, "Boy With Wings", is out in 2025.
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