Excerpt from This Is How It Really Sounds by Stuart Archer Cohen, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He made a few steps toward the house. The field was filled with stubble, and he could feel the cold dew soaking through his velvet tennis shoes. The earth was soft and rich. The rectangle of light on the other side of the mist seemed to pulse almost imperceptibly.

Pete! Where the hell are you going? Get your stoned ass up here!

Bobby's voice. He turned around and his manager was up at the top of the slope, at the edge of the gas station parking lot. Duffy and Cody were standing next to him and they probably thought he was still spaced from the mushrooms. Maybe he was. He turned and looked at the farmhouse again, the window with light in it, the dark ones where people were still sleeping. His other home. Cody: Come back up here before you get shot, man! We can't find another lead singer! The others yelled, too. He stopped and let their voices wash over his shoulders. The farmhouse was vibrating there, across the field.

He'd never reach it. His life had caught up with him, with its newspapers and its clothes all his size. He'd never reach it and he'd never be able to explain it and he tried writing a song about it afterward that never came out right, no matter how many words he added and subtracted. The song was about the house near Wilksbury, and the girl he never saw, but if it was the story of that girl, how could it not be the story of that gas station and the barn and the night before and the mushrooms they'd eaten? The rain in that place that had just turned to mist, but not the rain of the other place that they had left behind, the light in the window, the little cloud of darkness beneath the tree, the horse snorting, the grass breaking, the old man dreaming of a life he'd never lived, the trucker passing northbound on the turnpike strung with towns reaching for his thermos, thinking Six hundred miles. Six hundred miles. Six hundred miles . . . The best ones always got away.

Excerpted from This Is How It Really Sounds by Stuart Archer Cohen. Copyright © 2015 by Stuart Archer Cohen. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.