A Boaz Novel in Progress
What happens when a psychiatrist in a small Alabama town begins asking whether the beliefs everyone takes for granted are actually true?
Cover draft
Dr. Julian Stoner is a psychiatrist, former pastor, and longtime resident of Boaz, Alabama, who has spent much of his life thinking about belief—how it forms, why people hold to it, and what happens when certainty begins to crack.
When a series of encounters draws him into the lives of people wrestling with faith, doubt, family pressure, and inherited assumptions, Julian is forced to confront questions that are both intellectual and deeply personal.
As those questions spread through a small town where religion, identity, and community are tightly intertwined, Julian begins to see how difficult it can be to separate what people believe from who they understand themselves to be.
Beneath the Story
The Boaz Superstition is a novel about belief and doubt, inherited certainty, evidence, conscience, and the personal cost of asking whether something widely accepted is actually true.
It asks:
- How much of what we believe was chosen—and how much was simply inherited?
- What happens when evidence begins to conflict with beliefs tied to family, identity, and community?
- Why can questioning an idea feel like questioning the people who taught it to us?
- How much certainty do we need before calling something true?
- What responsibility do we have to examine beliefs that shape the way we live and judge others?
- What can doubt cost when belonging depends on certainty?
Julian’s struggle is not simply about religion. It is about the difficulty of examining any belief that has become part of who we are—and deciding what conscience requires when truth and belonging begin pulling in different directions.
About the Novel
Genre: Psychological / Southern Fiction
Setting: Boaz, Alabama
Status: In Progress
Author: Richard L. Fricks
Part of: The Boaz Novels
Publication information will be added here when the novel is complete.
From Richard
The Boaz Superstition grows out of questions I have lived with for years: how beliefs are inherited, why certainty can become part of identity, and what happens when a person begins examining ideas that a family or community has long treated as settled.
Julian Stoner gives me a way to explore those questions through fiction rather than argument. He understands religion from the inside, but he also understands how the mind protects what it has been taught to trust.
The novel is not about proving one side right and another wrong. It is about what questioning can cost, how difficult it can be to reconsider inherited beliefs, and what happens when doubt enters relationships built around certainty.
