THE AWFUL SHADOW is a restless memoir of tragedy, perseverance, personal restoration, and the unveiling of one public university’s ugly underbelly. Told through shifting, often colorful and humorous narrative styles and allusions to gothic fantasy video game elements, the author recounts a five-year odyssey through the death of his daughter, a dysfunctional workplace, a prolonged lawsuit settled out of court, crumbled relationships, a near death experience, spiritual transformation, music composition, and more.

 

At the heart of THE AWFUL SHADOW is a slick, university-style textbook called ACADEMIA CULPA that teaches specific administrative transgressions, woven from legal discovery, personal accounts, interviews, open records, and graphical data. 

 

THE AWFUL SHADOW concludes with a near-death experience, an outpouring of renegade prayers, and a new, sober view of a world anxiously grappling with its own transformation.

 

About the Author

JACK W STAMPS has spent a lifetime pursuing musical endeavors and has a doctorate in music composition from the University of Texas at Austin. He taught at the University of Texas at Austin and Seton Hall University. He composes electronic music under the name MC Debris and is a devoted researcher and philosopher of creative technologies. Stamps wrote the unconventional textbook, Pixel Samples Lumens Illusion (Kendall Hunt) and he has written commercial music for such commercial brands as Vans and Under Armour. Among his 150 chamber and electro-acoustic pieces, Stamps most values the two quartets written for the fantastic Tosca String Quartet. He lives in San Antonio with his son and co-parent nearby and frequently plays online games with a guy who, in 1973, was on the team that invented the pixel.