David and the Lion’s Den: Chapters

Story and Character Guide

James Finn
James Finn - The Blog
4 min readFeb 5, 2019

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Bloodline Art, Blood Loss — Acrylic Painting

What’s ‘David and the Lion’s Den’?

It’s my quirky, character-driven mystery novel set in Greenwich Village during the worst of the HIV Plague Years. David and a gang of only-in-New York personalities walk a path that leads to intense friendship and love, to the creation of gorgeous but wrenching art, and to the unraveling of a series of horrific events that nobody sees, not even as they happen. Because sometimes what you’re looking at isn’t what you see.

It all starts with David’s insensitive first sentence:

I slouched on the old fashioned park bench and tried not to stare at the hooker. She sat across from me in the shade of a ragged potted palm, tearing tiny pieces off a deli sandwich and popping them in her mouth to avoid smearing the wax caked on her lips.

The Cast:

  • David — A 23-year-old fine art painter from Kansas, trying to make it in Chelsea and the Village of late-1980s New York.
  • Jill — A slightly older young woman whose couch David crashes on. She’s “cool and hot, thick and curvy during an era when waif-thin was the fashion.”
  • Hilda — A beloved Village fixture in her late 80s — with a past that leaves David fascinated and repulsed. Every time he thinks he understands her, she shocks him again.
  • Carla — In her own words, Mistress Carla is New York’s “oldest working crossing-dressing dominatrix prostitute.” She and Hilda are close friends. David doesn’t understand why Carla seems to look out for him.
  • Richard — Another of Hilda’s close friends, Richard is a retired Madison Avenue ad man. He becomes David’s first fan, introducing him to movers and shakers in the Soho gallery scene.
  • Howie — His calling in life is bartending. He’s the life of the party and the beating moral heart of the novel. David falls in love with Howie without realizing it.
  • Raphael — A “preternaturally beautiful” youth, Raphael is aggressively bisexual and not adverse to taking pecuniary advantage of his looks. He’s also painfully shy and doesn’t have a friend in the world, something David doesn’t realize until it’s far too late.
  • The Colombian Boy — This mysterious character haunts the corners of the story. He first appears as a starving, freezing, 14-year-old immigrant. When his tale intersects with the main story, David’s life and art spin out of control.

The Chapters:

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James Finn
James Finn - The Blog

James Finn is an LGBTQ columnist, a former Air Force intelligence analyst, an alumnus of Act Up NY, and an agented but unpublished novelist.