“It’s not a sociological commentary,” Bob Feldman explains. “It’s just an observation on this village and the way of life it represents.”
Feldman is discussing his debut novel in a sunny nook at Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick, where he wrote much of “Deception Downeast: A Tale of Power, Blackmail, Genius and Redemption.”
The thriller is set in the fictional town of Eggemogin, Maine — not to be confused with the real-life Eggemoggin, a village on Deer Isle. “I just called it that because I fell in love with the word as a kid,” Feldman says.
The name wasn’t the only part of the state he fell for — he calls his book a “love letter to Maine.” Feldman first visited when he was 8, after a co-worker loaned his father a cabin in inland Maine. But “the coast has always felt like where I belonged,” he says.
Soon after Feldman and his wife were married, they vacationed at an inn on Bailey Island. That was when Feldman remembers thinking, “This is the place.” In 1990, they bought a home in Harpswell.
In “Deception Downeast,” Sam and Marilyn Wicker also buy a home in Maine.
Feldman didn’t mean for it to turn out that way. Sam Wicker, he says, just started taking over the plot.
“That’s the way the book emerged,” says Feldman. “The characters just told me what they were going to do and how they were going to say it.”
When Sam and his wife move back to the tiny Maine town where they grew up, they don’t expect to be leveraged by a malign energy company proposing to build a pipeline to Montreal. Complicating the plot is Marvin Schenk, a billionaire “NIMBY” who calls Eggemogin home. NIMBY stands for “not in my backyard” and is a term for people who oppose a development or project in their neighborhood.
“The original protagonists in the book don’t show up now until Chapter 40,” Feldman says. They are two lobstermen from a neighboring harbor.
The premise of the book was inspired by real events, Feldman explains, but “departs from those circumstances in every detail.”
Feldman has spent a lot of time admiring the complexity of the working waterfront, even stepping on board a lobster boat a couple of times. For more than a decade, he mentored Maine startups, including aquaculture businesses like Bangs Island Mussels.
“I guess I’ve always been able to absorb and synthesize information and turn it into agreeable language,” says Feldman, who formerly worked as a communications and marketing consultant with companies that build supercomputers, robotics and avionics. “In the end, it’s being an observer of the people and processes around you.”
Feldman, who now splits his time between Harpswell and Harvard, Massachusetts, describes himself as a “part-time year-round resident” of the former.
“I’ve always known if I got a moment to change my focus, I would write a longer-form piece of fiction, and it turned out to be a novel,” he says.
The idea for the story came to mind 10 years ago, but Feldman started working on it full time in 2022, finishing the 500-page book in December of 2023. He self-published in January, not wanting to wait to send the book out to market.
“My ambition is just that I wrote something that I’m happy with and a lot of people read it and enjoy it and let me know,” Feldman says. “I’ve written about a place and a demographic that I’m very attached to.”
That place is one he sees as increasingly endangered. “In the past, Maine was not a crossroads; it was a destination,” he says. “All the cultural glory that was specific to Maine was well preserved. Now things are changing.”
Having spent a career on the cutting edge of technology, Feldman is accustomed to change. Still, writing a book pushed him to exercise new levels of discipline and constancy.
“I’ve never done anything remotely as difficult as completing a long-form novel with many well-developed characters,” he says, mentioning that his wife, Joelle, a full-time artist, helped.
“She threw down the gauntlet,” says Feldman — but he was up to the challenge.
“There’s another book in the works,” he says. “Whether or not this becomes a series remains to be seen.”
“Deception Downeast” is available on Amazon.
