Fireflies: A Father's Tale of Love and Loss

In the bestselling novels of suspense master David Morrell, fear is the main subject. But Morrell himself had never known genuine terror until he watched his 15-year-old son wage a heroic but doomed struggle with cancer.

This is one father’s powerful and unforgettable story of fierce love, impenetrable loss, and an unexpected, breathtaking encounter with the miraculous. Ultimately, Fireflies is a tribute to the undying human spirit that has already given new hope to enthralled and grateful readers around the world.

David wrote this account for himself, but to his surprise, his candid portrait of grief turned out to help other people in grief or else the friends of those in grief. His discussions about panic attacks as well as the “could have, should have” syndrome and the stress within marriages after a child’s death are some of the reasons that David was asked to deliver several keynote speeches to national conferences of The Compassionate Friends, the world’s largest grief organization—for the parents, siblings, grandparents, and friends of children who have died.

“I found myself almost speechless….It left me feeling shaken, uplifted, and terribly moved.” —Stephen King, New York Times bestselling author of Doctor Sleep

“A powerful experience I shall remember for a long, long time. Thank you, Mr. Morrell, for sharing so much love so electrifyingly.” —Robert Ludlum, New York Times bestselling author of The Bourne Identity

“I was enormously impressed….One of the most poignant and passionate religious quests you will ever read….Don’t miss this story of how good people respond to bad things.” —Father Andrew M. Greeley, New York Times bestselling author of Angel Light

“A story that should have meaning and truth for every parent.” —Los Angeles Daily News

“A heartbreaking and inspiring account of devotion in the face of death.” —Detroit Free Press

My father was killed during World War II, shortly after I was born in 1943. My mother had difficulty raising me and at the same time holding a job, so she put me in an orphanage and later in a series of boarding homes. I grew up unsure of who I was, desperately in need of a father figure. Books and movies were my escape. Eventually I decided to be a writer and sought help from two men who became metaphorical fathers to me: Stirling Silliphant, the head writer for the classic TV series "Route 66" about two young men in a Corvette who travel America in search of themselves, and Philip Klass (whose pen name is William Tenn), a novelist who taught at the Pennsylvania State University where I went to graduate school from 1966 to 1970. The result of their influence is my 1972 novel, First Blood, which introduced Rambo. The search for a father is prominent in that book, as it is in later ones, most notably The Brotherhood of the Rose (1984), a thriller about orphans and spies. During this period, I was a professor of American literature at the University of Iowa. With two professions, I worked seven days a week until exhaustion forced me to make a painful choice and resign from the university in 1986. One year later, my fifteen-year-old son, Matthew, died from bone cancer, and thereafter my fiction tended to depict the search for a son, particularly in Fireflies (1988) and Desperate Measures (1994). To make a new start, my wife and I moved to the mountains and mystical light of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where my work changed yet again, exploring the passionate relationships between men and women, highlighting them against a background of action as in the newest, Burnt Sienna. To give his stories a realistic edge, he has been trained in wilderness survival, hostage negotiation, executive protection, antiterrorist driving, assuming identities, electronic surveillance, and weapons. A former professor of American literature at the University of Iowa, Morrell now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.