Worship of Hollow Gods

In Worship of Hollow Gods, James Sniechowski bears witness to the world of a sensitive, nine-year-old boy, subjected to the underbelly of his Polish Catholic family in working class Detroit. The year is 1950. The family gathers for a Friday night family poker/pinochle party. The outcome reveals a world no one ever talked about then and are forbidden to talk about now—the unspoken, the impermissible, the reality beneath every family's practiced facade—and what lies beneath when the front has been ripped away. Sniechowski unsparingly yet compassionately evokes the temptations, trials, and tactics of the family characters while revealing the hollow gods they naively but fatefully worshipped. Readers, no matter where in the world, will be prompted if not pushed to confront the hollow gods that reside, like living ghosts, in the unseen of their family's way of life, the invisible that sources and shapes their beliefs and behaviors.

Worship of Hollow Gods dredges up familial bonds that grip and hold tight, unconsciously dictating our destiny. It is story telling at its caring and compelling best.