And music is at the heart of Denver author James Tyler Toothman's new novel, Three Sixes and a Forked Tongue (or Cold Medicine and a Liar), which hits shelves on December 21, just in time for the winter solstice. Set in 1971 West Virginia, the novel follows two friends who come upon a book in the deep woods — one that threatens to unravel reality as the world knows it. It's a rush of irreverence, embracing the profane, and utterly engrossing as a read.
The launch date coinciding with the solstice is no accident, just like it's not a random occurrence that Toothman's first novel is heavy with musical cues. The former is because, as Toothman puts it, "it's the longest night of the year, and that's pretty metal." And the latter is because music has always been a huge part of his life.
The promotional cover for Three Sixes and a Forked Tongue (from art by Nicole Cooper)
Millions of Colors Publishing
It was in college at West Virginia University that Toothman first considered writing a novel, but he says his first attempt — like many first attempts — didn't work out the way he'd planned. "I wasn't measuring up to my favorite writers," he says. "I realized that I didn't have enough to offer yet. I didn't have the wisdom. So in my early twenties, I decided to give myself ten more years. Do some living and some learning and some traveling and some growing, and then I'd come back to it."
That was the plan, anyway — and Toothman followed through with it until he turned thirty and his mother was dying. Before she died, she suggested he pick his writing back up again. "She was on her deathbed, and she told me it was time," he says, his voice breaking a little. "She always encouraged my writing. So after she passed, I dropped everything I was doing, all my other artistic pursuits, and put everything I had into this book. That started five years of writing, plus two more getting it published." Appropriately enough, the book is dedicated to Toothman's late mother.
Toothman, like Three Sixes, has deep roots in West Virginia, but he calls Denver home now. He initially came out during the years of the pot boom; a friend promised to teach him how to grow cannabis. Toothman was looking for a new start anyway, and this friend had a grow house and no one to run it; Toothman ended up leaving West Virginia within a day or so and moved everything out to Colorado. "I had a girlfriend at the time," he laughs, "who was in South America at a silent yoga retreat. I was living in Denver for a week before she could even get hold of me." And that was the end of that relationship, a loss Toothman still regrets.
"Living a Lynyrd Skynyrd song isn't as fun as just listening to it it, you know?" Toothman grins. "It sounds better without the hell to pay."
Still, the move to Denver worked financially. Toothman was able to save up some money and quit his job when the pandemic began. "I feel like I was one of the lucky ones," he says. "The pandemic was exactly what I needed. I had to stay in, and all I had to do was work. So it worked out in that sense, for sure."
The idea for Three Sixes and a Forked Tongue came to Toothman right after he lost his mom. He was sitting and drinking with the mom of one of his buddies, talking about life and death and memory, and she brought up the southern West Virginia coal town where she'd grown up — a time when people still burned coal in their house furnaces, in a place where coal was constantly being trucked down the streets in open beds. "She said that women couldn't even wear white dresses in that town because by the end of the day, they'd just be black," says Toothman. "Those words stuck with me. It's the most heavy-metal shit I'd ever heard. That started it all."
Toothman says it worked with the ideas for the book he already had in mind: something "fun and adventurous, but dark," with female protagonists in tribute to his mother. But he admits that he "pantsed it the whole way. I'd get to the end of a chapter and ask myself, 'Okay, now what?'" A lot of the darkness in the book and how it was built chapter by chapter was reflected in some of the things Toothman had experienced firsthand. He'd seen a guy kill himself by jumping into a fire at Burning Man. A friend similarly badly burned himself in a failed attempt at suicide — and that was a guy that Toothman claims spiritually healed him.
"I'm not kidding," Toothman says. "He Jesus-healed me. I've been anti-Christian my entire life, but I met this guy, and before the night was over, he'd healed the arthritis I'd had in my hand for years up to that point." Toothman is adamant that all of these things — the fire, the death, the healing, the pain — were instrumental in how the book came to be.
Getting the book finished to his satisfaction was only the first step, however. Publishing something is a whole other matter. "For about six months, I tried the traditional ways. Sending out the manuscript, all that," Toothman recalls. "Meanwhile, there was one person I had reading the book as I was finishing chapters, one by one. She was able to follow along the whole process. I was over at her and her husband's house one night, and they were asking about the publishing process, and I was telling them all about how it was going — or not going. She said she'd read thousands of books, and my book was in her top three; she asked if I'd let them publish it."
At the time, Toothman's friend already had a real estate company with her husband; over the next year and a half, they founded Millions of Colors LLC, a new publishing company based in Lakewood designed specifically to put out Three Sixes and a Forked Tongue, plus its audiobook version.
Toothman is debuting the book in West Virginia before returning to Denver, where he plans to do some launch events locally. For now, he's enjoying the birth of Three Sixes and a Forked Tongue, and all it implies to him and his life as it's unfolded in recent years. Writing the book, he says, "really made me ask myself what I really knew. And the answer was that I didn't know shit. Most of us think we know what's going on, but we don't. And that's what the book is really about. There's a lot out there that we don't know. The real answer is out there, sure, but it's something beyond our comprehension. It's beyond anything we can verbalize. All we can do is ask the right questions."
Three Sixes and a Forked Tongue (or Cold Medicine and a Liar) will be available from booksellers starting on December 21. For updates and more information, see the author's website.
