About Dancing Skeletons 

After completing my MFA in Fiction at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2015, I signed with a literary agent who sold my debut novel, The Concrete to Ig Publishing. The novel was endorsed by National Book Award finalist, Andre Dubus III, who said, “This is a heartbreakingly beautiful novel, an honest work of art, and it heralds the debut of a remarkable and important young American novelist.” Andre mentioned the book in an interview with the New York Times, hundreds of pre-sales were coming in, and there was some national buzz surrounding the book’s release in May of 2018, but for whatever reason, the book couldn’t maintain the momentum that Andre helped create. The Concrete wasn’t substantially promoted or reviewed, and my novel, like so many other fiction debuts, faded into the obscurity of that season’s releases.

Naturally I was disappointed.

Around that time, I read Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine series and was blown away by how seamlessly she navigated multiple points of view through generations of families. I left the experience asking myself, “Why didn’t I do something like this with The Concrete? Why did I confine such a sprawling world inside of a 325-page novel?” I paced my Grand Rapids apartment remembering the excitement of getting my first book deal, the endorsement of Andre Dubus III, and the disappointment of The Concrete never gaining traction after a promising initial push. Then I asked myself, “Why can’t I do something like this with The Concrete?”

After months of back and forth with the publisher, I was able to negotiate a reversion of rights of my novel, and I have spent the last five years evolving the world into a generational epic I’m calling Dancing Skeletons. The work is literary fiction that likes to dip a toe in magical realism. Think A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James meets The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz meets The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano. The themes present range from generational trauma, addiction, and infidelity, to overcoming adversity, and pursuing identity within the complexities of mixed-race families.

The project is now well-along, currently at around 200,000 words, and written from 19 different points of view of all walks of life, ranging from drug dealers, addicts, and sex workers to failed musicians, athletes, and everyday people working monotonous jobs, all searching for meaning in life while trudging through the laborious business of being human. The soul of the original The Concrete is still present in the book, but it is very much an original work of art, now spanning through generations of families from the mid-sixties to the present day.

My goal is to have a polished draft completed by January 1, 2026, and to spend next year querying literary agents and testing the market.

Daniel Abbott

March 27, 2025