Fiction
Kelsey Maurine Brickl’s fiction moves across historical drama, literary reimagining, regional storytelling, and psychological pressure, with a recurring interest in class, reputation, longing, moral constraint, and the private costs of public identity.
Her published and current fiction projects trace the same preoccupations that shape her criticism and screenwriting: belief systems, social coercion, family control, institutional mythologies, and the stories people tell to survive what history, love, or necessity demands of them.
Published Fiction
Brickl’s published fiction includes:
The Most Dangerous Dream: Leroux’s Phantom Reimagined
Wolves and Urchins: The Early Life of Inspector Javert
Hardtack: A Civil War Story
Sing for Me: A Chicago Story
Paint
Risk and Reward
These works move across historical fiction, literary adaptation, regional storytelling, and psychologically driven character work, often returning to questions of class, longing, reputation, violence, performance, and moral pressure.
“When some women felt fear, they covered it with an iron grate of courage, I thought. Men might be dangerous, but they were very often unperceptive. If fear only rumbled through a woman’s soul and glittered through her eyes, then perhaps the man she feared would not be aware it was there at all. He might even think that she was entirely confident, dauntless. He might believe her veneer of bravery.”
Kelsey Maurine Brickl, Paint
