Four Days Of Silence

About the Book

Four Days of Silence is what critics mean when they talk about good escapist entertainment.  Drawing on many classic western conventions, but always maintaining an originality and freshness, Larry D. Clark’s novel is a story of violence and brutality contrasted by gentleness and love.  It is the story of Adam Chandler, willing to sacrifice everything to retrieve over 23 million dollars in gold taken from his great-grandfather by hostile Indians in the high Simcoe Mountains of Washington State.  Already, the lure of the gold has called three generations of Chandlers to their deaths.  An Indian/white man love triangle over an Indian girl, an ancient legend surrounding intrusion of the Yakama Indians’ sacred land in the Simcoe Mountains, a curse carried by the Chandler family, and a volcanic eruption during Adam Chandler’s own death ceremony add up to a page-turner.  Chandler finds himself suspended over a bed of one hundred rattlesnakes — the death pit of his ancestors — at the hands of the Ancient Ones.  He finally understands the Yakama Indians’ secret as he stares down at his great-grandfather’s skeleton in the death pit.  The will of the Yakamas to preserve the secret of the Ancient Ones in the high Simcoes is as strong as Adam Chandler’s will to fulfill his own family’s destiny as both Levi Strongbull and Adam Chandler struggle over their individual compulsions and their love for the same woman.  From beginning to end, Four Days of Silence offers strong action and fine characterizations in an engrossing story that adds up to great entertainment and a quick read.

About the Author

Larry D. Clark retired in 2005, ending a thirty-eight-year high school English teaching career.  He spent one year at Connell High School in Connell, Washington, the farming community where his wife grew up.  For the next thirty years, Larry taught English at A.C. Davis High School in Yakima, Washington, the school from which Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas graduated.  Larry completed his high school English teaching career as a founding faculty member of La Salle High School in Union Gap, Washington, 1998 to 2005. 

Throughout his thirty-eight-year teaching career, Larry practiced his craft by writing two other novels that he has never tried to publish.  He plans to rewrite both of these novels now that he has retired.  He began the first, If Not This Dream, while working twelve-hour shifts running a grain elevator in the isolated hills a few miles from Connell.  It took him two years to complete a draft of the novel.  He completed a draft of his second novel, Will the Real Jeff Creek, in 1972.  He actually completed a draft of Four Days of Silence in 1980, the year Mt. St. Helens erupted.

Larry has also written two collections of poetry, Another Time Long Ago, a collection of the author’s reflections on what he fondly calls “nature and love and stuff.” The second collection of sixty poems, Beyond the Wrath, recalls the memories of his father, who died at age thirty-seven when Larry was only a sophomore at Toppenish High School in Toppenish, Washington. 

Larry is presently substitute teaching at Eisenhower and Davis high schools in Yakima and is in the early stages of writing a new novel, Buffalo Man, which he plans to complete in about two years.