Some secrets do not stay buried. They write themselves into blood and bone. They pass from grandmother to mother to daughter through mechanisms we are only beginning to understand. The Inheritance, the second novel in the Fractional Fiction series, asks what happens when a scientist trained to study transgenerational trauma in laboratory mice discovers that the patterns she has been mapping exist in her own DNA.
The premise is rooted in contemporary research. In her Cambridge laboratory, epigeneticist Anna Osborne studies how trauma alters gene expression and passes to subsequent generations. The science is controversial, the implications unsettling, and Anna has spent her career maintaining professional distance from the questions that haunt her own family. Then her mother dies, leaving behind a crumbling farmhouse in Nebraska, a confession recorded in the final hours of morphine clarity, and evidence that the secrets Anna has been running from are written into her own cells.
What follows is a literary mystery in the truest sense. Not a puzzle to be solved with clues and deductions, but an excavation of three generations of silence, transgression, and the price families pay for choosing protection over truth. The Vance Farm holds answers that Claire spent sixty years burying. A murder disguised as an accident. A pregnancy that arrived at precisely the wrong moment. A family system built on silence so complete that even the women who lived through it could not speak of what they knew. Now Anna must piece together the truth from land records and DNA profiles, from her grandmother’s calculated denials and her great-uncle’s deathbed words, from the methylation patterns in her own cells that carry memories she never made.
The Fractional Fiction Method
Fractional Fiction takes classic literature and reimagines it through the lens of modern knowledge. Each novel begins with public domain source texts whose themes, character dynamics, and dramatic architecture have proven their capacity to illuminate human experience. These elements fuse with contemporary scientific, historical, or philosophical research to create something entirely new. Not adaptation. Not pastiche. Transformation with purpose.
The Dying Grove, the first Fractional Fiction novel, drew on James Joyce’s “Dubliners” and contemporary mycorrhizal network research to explore consciousness, connection, and what we owe to the systems that sustain us. “The Inheritance” operates on a different axis, drawing on three towering works of dramatic literature to examine the inheritance of sin, the biology of memory, and the question of whether we can escape what our ancestors made us.
The Source Constellation
Three plays provide the dramatic DNA for “The Inheritance,” each contributing essential elements to the synthesis.
William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” (c. 1600) supplies the investigative architecture. Anna, like the Prince of Denmark, is summoned home by a parent’s death and confronted with demands for action she did not seek. Her scientific training makes her, like Hamlet, someone who needs proof before acting, who investigates obsessively, who is haunted by a demand to address injustice she did not commit. The ghost that haunts the Vance Farm is not supernatural but epigenetic, speaking through altered gene expression rather than spectral visitation. Yet the central question remains: what does the present owe to the dead?
Henrik Ibsen’s “Ghosts” (1881) provides the thematic engine. Ibsen’s drama of inherited sin, generational silence, and the terrible cost of respectability maps directly onto the Vance family’s situation. Mrs. Alving’s discovery that her son has inherited his father’s disease becomes Anna’s discovery that trauma leaves molecular traces. The Norwegian parlor becomes a Nebraska farmhouse, but the question remains the same: what price do children pay for the secrets their parents chose to keep? What happens when the protection offered by silence becomes the poison that destroys?
Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms” (1924) contributes the American vernacular and the contested territory. O’Neill’s play concerns a son who believes his father’s farm should be his inheritance, a young stepmother who becomes his lover, and the catastrophic consequences of these entanglements. The Oedipal dynamics connect directly to “Hamlet.” The inheritance theme connects to both Ibsen and Shakespeare. The American rural setting provides a distinct register from the Danish court and the Norwegian parlor. In “The Inheritance,” the Vance Farm functions as O’Neill’s farm does: as contested ground where property, identity, and transgression become inextricable.
The Research Domain
The three source texts agree on one point: the past determines the present, and escape is impossible. The Ghost demands vengeance. Mrs. Alving cannot outrun her husband’s syphilis. Eben and Abbie destroy themselves because they cannot stop wanting what they should not have. Classical tragedy does not believe in freedom.
Contemporary epigenetics complicates that certainty. Research now suggests that trauma can alter gene expression without changing the underlying DNA sequence, that these alterations can pass to subsequent generations, and that they may be reversible through sustained intervention. The inheritance is real, it is measurable, it shapes who we are before we are born, and yet it may not be destiny. The mouse studies Anna conducts in her laboratory show both the reality of transgenerational trauma transmission and the possibility that environmental enrichment, sustained care, and breaking the cycle of stress can attenuate its effects.
This scientific uncertainty creates the novel’s dramatic tension. The source texts all answer “no” to the question of escape. The science answers “maybe.” Anna must navigate between these possibilities, discovering what her family buried while deciding what she will do with the knowledge. The question is not merely whether she can learn the truth. The question is whether knowing the truth changes anything.
The Novel’s Architecture
“The Inheritance” braids three timelines across four generations. The 1950s and 1960s reveal the original catastrophe: Margaret’s suicide in the barn, Edmund’s cold erasure of first one wife and then another, the affair between Helen and her stepson Thomas, and Edmund’s death under circumstances that remain permanently ambiguous. The 1990s and 2000s show Claire inheriting secrets she does not fully understand, raising her daughter Anna with an intensity that borders on desperation, and finally succumbing to the dementia that will force everything into the open. The present follows Anna’s investigation, her confrontation with the family history, and her decision about what to do with what she learns.
The structure honors all three source texts while creating something none of them contains: the possibility that knowledge might enable change, that understanding the mechanism might provide leverage against it. Anna is pregnant by the novel’s end. The question of what she will tell her child, and whether the telling itself might begin to break the chain, remains open. The tragic sources would close that door. The science leaves it ajar. The novel holds both possibilities without resolving the tension between them.
About the Author and Publisher
David Boles is an author, dramatist, editor, publisher, and teacher with an MFA from Columbia University. He founded David Boles Books Writing and Publishing in 1975. The Fractional Fiction series emerges from a conviction that classic literature deserves more than reverence. It deserves transformation. The plays that have survived centuries did so because they asked questions that remain unanswered. Shakespeare wanted to know what we owe the dead. Ibsen wanted to know whether silence protects or poisons. O’Neill wanted to know whether we can escape the land and blood that made us. These questions did not expire with their authors. They persist because human beings persist in facing the same dilemmas across generations.
Fractional Fiction exists to bring those questions forward, not by updating settings or modernizing dialogue, but by fusing dramatic architecture with contemporary knowledge. The method is deliberate: source analysis, research integration, structural synthesis. The goal is fiction that carries the weight of literary tradition while speaking to present concerns. Each novel documents its origins so readers can trace the connections themselves, can see how classic literature continues to speak through new forms when given the chance.
Getting “The Inheritance”
“The Inheritance” is available now as a Kindle edition for $9.99 at Amazon and as a paperback version for $19.99. A free PDF is also available at David Boles Books for those who prefer that format. An audiobook is in production for those who prefer to listen.
This is a novel about what we owe to the dead, what the body remembers that the mind forgets, and the price of breaking silences that were meant to last forever. It is also, like all Fractional Fiction, an experiment in literary synthesis: asking whether classic dramatic structures can find new life when fused with contemporary knowledge, whether the questions that haunted Shakespeare and Ibsen and O’Neill still haunt us, and whether the answers might be different now that we understand more about how inheritance actually works.
The wound remains faithful, but perhaps the chain can break. That uncertainty is not a weakness. It is the point.
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