Joel Vernon Smith invites you to watch while life unfolds for entities we’ll never meet, in settings far from our day-to-day locales. Each character is someone we once loved. Or we wish we could have loved. Or perhaps we seek merely to understand her. A sensitive teen takes his dad’s memory for a ride in a new four-wheel-drive in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. A married couple shares a traumatic memory of a decaying barn. A passionate duo learns that their ship is doomed. A wealthy college student argues with his girlfriend when a draft notice arrives. A mentally-troubled elderly woman claims a friendship with a man of smoke. Frightful demons force a man to do a dark tunnel-dance in front of a stalled bus. The author of The Rapists bids you to explore the lives of mostly-gentle human beings as they deal with feelings of love or the arrival of unexpected horror. If it’s true (as a late-sixties song suggests) that words of love won’t win a girl’s heart anymore, perhaps the reader should open this book and take a journey to somewhere she’s never been before. The ride will be exciting.