Val K. and the Murder Castle

Chicago, 1891-1896-a city expanding fast. Steam whistles, tenement stoups, the smell of coal, the clang of horsecars. Polish immigrants crowd the Near-west Side, carrying their language, saints, griefs, and hopes. In the midst of this restless, muscular city rises the most extraordinary and terrible building of the decade: the three-story labyrinth known as the Murder Castle. This novel steps away from sensationalized crime narratives and enters the world of the ordinary people who brushed against that darkness without knowing it.

The story follows the Karnowski family, Polish Catholics struggling to gain a foothold in Chicago Polonia. Valentine Karnowski, a skilled joiner, works long hours and scrapes together additional income wherever he can-including jobs subcontracted to the strange hotel rising at 63rd and Wallace. He sees only the work before him: tight deadlines, shifting instructions, sealed spaces he is told not to question. In a city where unemployment can rise without warning and manhood is judged by whether a man can provide bread and a home, Val cannot afford to walk away. Yet guilt begins to root itself in him, even as he tries to believe the Castle is merely an eccentric businessman's whim.

At home, Marcyanna holds the family together with prayer, determination, and the stubborn pride of a woman who will not let hardship win. Their children-Vincent, Frank, Felix, Joanna, Luke, and Marianna-grow into the city's rhythms: shrill factory whistles, friendly parish festivals, the hunger of lean months, and the frightening typhoid that sweeps the city. Thru their eyes, readers enter the real texture of immigrant life: bad drinking water, child labor, crowded wooden houses, and the upright moral world of Fr. Barzyński, who guides, rebukes, and consoles his flock.

Chicago itself is a character. The World's Columbian Exposition dazzles the public while masking the poverty lingering only blocks away. Political machines tighten their grip on the wards, and whispers of police corruption drift thru saloons and alleys. Meanwhile, strange disappearances orbit the handsome, persuasive figure known as H. H. Holmes, tho few suspect anything amiss until it is too late.

As the Murder Castle fills with rumors and dread, Val feels the pressure of complicity without knowledge. He struggles to confess what he cannot name, fearing both the loss of his livelihood and the judgment of God. Neighbors, shopkeepers, parishioners, and even policemen appear in glimpses-each carrying a piece of the truth, none able to see the whole.

In 1896, when the Castle's secrets finally surface, the Karnowskis must confront the question that lies at the heart of the novel: What responsibility does an ordinary person bear for evil he did not intend, but helped make possible?

Rich in historical detail, steeped in the reality of Chicago Polonia, this novel offers an intimate lens on one of America's most infamous crimes, and the people who unwittingly enabled him to act-and the cost of surviving in a world where conscience, poverty, faith, and fear collide.

Gerald was born in 1937 in Chicago. As a child he was an avid reader of How to Draw books. One day at age 11 he wandered over to the Grown-up Books section of the public library and pulled down a picture-book of gothic cathedrals. He fell in love with their beauty. His mother used to give him the white paper in which the butcher had wrapped meat. Finding a large piece of plywood, he became "the only kid on his block" who used to sketch up gothic cathedral façades. He began studying Architecture in 1955 and worked his way thru college, earning a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Illinois in 1966. He is proud to say that he never took a penny of student loans. He received an Illinois license in 1972. Sometime after that he began conducting genealogical research on his ancestors. He speaks Polish, German, and Spanish to some extent. He has a gift for language.
Gerald has undergone three intensifications of faith in his life: one at age fourteen, when, as a child prodigy he became the object of three years of abuse by his classmates. He endured and graduated. The second was at age twenty-two, when it appeared he was about to die. He told himself, "If I'm gonna die, I'm gonna go out in a blaze of glory", and joined volunteer groups that kept him active every night of the week. The third was in 1982, when a concurrence of events, including the loss of a job, left him "down and out", and God gave him a new image of Himself as a very loving Father.
After this last intensification in 1982 began to feel the call to do something more directly to promote Jesus' kingdom on earth. He began to explore religious life. It saddened him to see the majority of adult Catholics coasting thru life on a few simplistic ideas that they picked up in early life. In 1992 he sold a condo in Chicago and used the money from the sale for education. He entered Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio in September, 1992. Once there he responded to a call by Fr. Michael Scanlon TOR and entered Holy Apostles Seminary for older men in Cromwell, CT. in fall, 1993. He spent 3 1/2 months doing door-to-door evangelization in Ceres and Modesto, CA in summer, 1994 while on assignment at St. Jude's parish, Ceres. He concluded that religious life was not for him and returned to Franciscan U. and earned a Master of Arts degree in Theology and Christian Ministry in 1996.
Unable to find work with his degree, and running out of money, he found a job as an archit...