A Novella Portrays a Child’s Otherworldly Trek to Deal With Grief 

Growing up the son of the entrepreneurial owner of an import/export business, Jeff Gunhus’ life was anything but dull. “At age 5, I lived in Athens, Greece, and we also lived in Cyprus and Saudi Arabia,” he relates. “I spent ages 5 to 12 swimming in the Mediterranean, climbing over the Greek and Roman ruins, [and] seeing the Bedouins in the desert.”

So it’s no wonder that Gunhus’ novels (he’s written 16 of them as well as six nonfiction books) are filled with adventure, whether it’s his six-book Jack Templar, Monster Hunter YA series (2012-2016) or more adult fare like Night Chill (2013), his bestselling book, or the USA Today bestseller, Killer Pursuit (2019). 

That’s certainly the case with his new novella, Caroline and Mordecai the Gand: A Fantasy, a sad, sometimes scary, often sweet work about a young girl coming to terms with the death of her father.

For Gunhus, a construction company owner who lives in rural Anne Arundel County, Maryland, it’s deeply personal, coming as he fought his own battle against cancer. “In 2016, I had a diagnosis of stage 3 metastasized melanoma,” Gunhus says. “Then I made the mistake of going to Google and looking it up, and what I found, as far as recovery rates and such, was just devastating [and] heartbreaking as a father of five. The worst thing you could do is lose a child, and from my perspective, this was losing all five at one time and losing my wife as well.”

Surgery and immunotherapy followed, and while being treated, the writer began to take some notes. “If I did die, I wanted to leave something for my kids,” he explains. “It started off as a letter to each kid, but that was too much. I chose to tell a story and try to get the same ideas across to them [that] I’d wanted to get across in the letters.”

Gunhus’ book, which Kirkus Reviews says has a “profound simplicity” in a starred review, opens with a dying mother’s note to her child, telling her a fanciful tale she says happened to her when she was young. That tale is Caroline and Mordecai the Gand, and we find out early on that the heroine of the story is struggling with her father’s death in an accident weeks before: 

Being alone was something the adults in her life had rarely allowed since her dad’s death. They thought she needed to be minded, watched over like a porcelain doll that someone might bump into and nudge over, smashing it on the hard floor. It was too late for that. A month after the accident and she was still in a million pieces. Broken beyond repair. 

Caroline, though, is far from brittle. A window to another world takes her far from home, and her quest to get back pits her against witches, dragons, and other creatures, all the while being helped by a mysterious traveler named Mordecai. The reader’s first look at Mordecai is indicative of the vivid description that Gunhus uses throughoutthe novel: 

He was a man, lean in body and face, tall even though he hunched over a gnarled wood walking staff. He wore a white tunic under an embroidered jacket with high collars and tails that seemed old-fashioned. His pants were cinched with a wide black belt with a silver buckle the size of a fist. The bottoms of his trousers were stuffed into knee-high leather boots that were well-worn and caked in mud. 

The unlikely duo works to get Caroline home, and in the process, the young girl learns lessons about her grief, ones Gunhus wanted to impart to his own children (including his 12-year-old daughter, Caroline).

“I assumed my family was going to be sad if I died, but I didn’t want that to be the only thing,” he says. “My biggest fear was that they’d avoid talking about Dad because they were sad. I wanted it to be different. Grief is normal, but let’s rejoice about the great things in people’s lives, the laughter and the love and the joy.” 

Family figures prominently throughout Gunhus’ life and work, from instilling his love of reading to eventually deciding to write books of his own. “When I was growing up, we didn’t have any English-speaking television, so as a family, we just read books,” he says. “The rule was you could read whatever you wanted to read.” That led to 12-year-old Jeff’s introduction to Stephen King through Pet Sematary. King has remained an influence on Gunhus’ work along with Steve Berry and Neil Gaiman, among others. 

After the family moved back to the United States and Gunhus graduated from the University of California Santa Barbara, he went into business with three friends. Twenty-eight years later, they’re still business partners running the construction company National Services Group. “While we’re building this business and I’m working 80 hours a week trying to make ends meet, I’d still wake up at 5:30 in the morning and write something,” says Gunhus, whose first book was the nonfiction No Parachute Required (2001).

When Gunhus’ oldest son, Jackson, was 11 and struggling with reading, Gunhus decided that the answer was making him the star of his own book. Jack Templar, Monster Hunter (2012) also featured Jackson’s younger brother, William, and since then, all of Gunhus’ children have appeared in his books. 

Gunhus’ children, now ages 11 to 21, have read Caroline and Mordecai the Gand and like it, but there’s one longtime fan who won’t pick it up. His wife, Nicole, whom he calls his “rock,” doesn’t care to read it, he says. “Whenever I ask her about it, she says, ‘I lived it.’ ”

For his part, Gunhus accomplished what he was attempting to do. “I was seeking a catharsis to get it all out there, and I think I did that,” he says. “It was a good writing experiment because it was definitely emotional.” 

Now cancer-free, Gunhus doesn’t expect to quit writing anytime soon. “This is my passion,” he says. “I feel very thankful that it doesn’t have to pay the bills. As soon as it stops being fun, I’ll stop doing it.”

Alec Harvey, former president of the Society for Features Journalism, is a freelance writer based in Alabama.