The Site of My Upcoming Novel, “Revolution Calling,” the Former North Carroll High School

/ Ray Van Horn, Jr.

My forthcoming novel, Revolution Calling, to be released soon by Raw Earth Ink, is set in the year 1988, the year I graduated high school. Funny enough, we are about to celebrate our class’s 35th year reunion next month.

My alma mater is North Carroll High School, doubled as Merriweather High in Revolution Calling. Back then, you could call North Carroll High a rural-suburban school as its homebased town Hampstead was in the midst of gradual, resistant industrialization. It’s one of the themes I explore in the story.

North Carroll High School officially closed its doors in 2015 due to a population burst prompting the opening of a new school in the neighboring town of Manchester. Beyond that, however, a decline in school-aged children ensued as much of my generation and that behind me began to move from the area. Frankly put, North Carroll was left to flounder in the shadow of upgrade one burg over. Considering Manchester Valley High won bragging rights by its newness, North Carroll was repurposed in part for the local police. In recent times, the Coppermine fitness company bought into the building and its outdoor facilities, keeping the premises operational for sports and theater inside the former school’s auditorium. This, still sharing the back end of the school with the Hampstead police department.

Having spent nearly two years writing Revolution Calling after first coming up with the concept of an Outsiders type of story for Generation X heavy-metal-style while in the music industry, I took a walk around the campus of my old school. The first thing I thought of was to look at myself now versus the longhair grit who used to prowl these halls from 1984 to 1988. I know my peers from North Carroll, many of whom I’ve stayed friends with and have routine dinner and drink dates with, probably laugh even harder at the sight of khaki cargo shorts, a peach tee and hair shaved to two inches.

I took a lot of pictures of scenes which appear in Revolution Calling and I’m happier than hell they match what I wrote. At least, to my mind’s eye and hopefully those who went to North Carroll High with me. For everyone else, the fictional Merriweather High and their cougar school mascot is a thinly-veiled disguise for North Carroll Panthers. As we all say amongst our North Carroll tribe across the decades before its closure, we are Panther Strong.

So have a look at these pictures before Revolution Calling’s release and I hope it’ll help put some context to the story. What you see in these pictures is where my characters breathe. The two protagonists of the story, Rob and Jason, are me divided into two leads. I didn’t rely upon actual friendships and relationships from my high school days. Only a handful of characters are based on real people. The story is built around my life back then, collecting the hardest moments of my teenaged life and compressing the events into a two-month narrative for the story. Most of Revolution Calling happened to me, until it hits the violent side in the story, which evolves into fiction.

I laughed the hardest in my revisit tour at the “Senior patio” I use in the story, where students of the day were allowed to smoke outdoors, if you can get your head around that.

Finally, I ran a gazillion miles around North Carroll’s track after graduation and I was pleased to see it felt and looks exactly the same. The track has a pivotal moment in the story for Jason’s evolution, as it doubled my own struggle to belong as a metalhead infiltrating the jock life by taking three years of Weightlifting class and becoming accepted by those guys in time. Same as with the rest my classmates. It had become a rare thing where a headbanger had found social acceptance amongst so many different walks of life in the high school social strata. My precise thesis for writing Revolution Calling.

Sometimes you really can go home…

–Photos by Ray Van Horn, Jr.

17 thoughts on “The Site of My Upcoming Novel, “Revolution Calling,” the Former North Carroll High School”

  1. Fun memories and photos. I was an inner city kid (going to school in “The Projects” to a high school that had a terrible reputation). We had something very close to your “Patio”, our “Mall”, for smoking in back when Target still carried cigarettes for $1.25/pack or something like that (from an unsecure endcap at that). And yes, I was one of the hoodlums out there destroying my lungs…

    Looking forward to your book, mate.

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    • Thanks, brother. I can’t wait for it to be released. This has been a bucket list project I came up with when I was still writing in the music industry. I’m thrilled it’s becoming a reality. It carries so much of my soul in it. That sounds rough for your time in school and whatever trials and misfortunes I may have gone through, it’s nothing compared to inner city school. Glad you made it through, man! I only smoked for a month the summer after school in reaction to a lot of girl problems, but once I got over that shit, I put the pedal to the metal and was dating my fool head off the next few years.

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      • It was school. :shrug:

        Not too rough, but you didn’t f**k around, you know. But woe to any outsider who messed with someone from the neighborhood — some of those cats took umbrage to anyone messing with a fellow “Northsider”, regardless of the clique you were in. In ways, it was protective as well as a bit of a gauntlet. “Nobody kills my buddy but me!” was the unspoken motto. 😉

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      • LOL, I get that mentality. Even in the rural county, there was monster rivalry between our school and two others, albeit the biggest school of the county was EVERYONE’s rival, lol. It was also the central hub of social life for the entire county, which I didn’t write about and probably should’ve, but…ehh, another time for another project. Definitely a matter of fisticuffs dropping over school turf, for certain. Varsity jackets were the “colors.”

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  6. I’m looking forward to your book too. I love books about coming of age.
    In my high school in the 1970s we had a designated smoking lounge. And most kids would smoke pot there. But they also smoked in bathrooms. I never liked smoking (thank goodness for that) and pot either didn’t do anything for me, or made me too wonky. I finally found a CBD water soluble that I love and use every day. It’s helping me deal with the grief of my mom’s death. But back to YOU since this is your blog, I am so happy for you, writing this book. All the best to you; the first book you write will always be the most exciting. You’re going to love that moment when you wake up and say, “I’m an author!” and get all tingly!

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  7. Yeah, smoking in the bathrooms at school is still a thing, according to my son, who got himself into some trouble in his prior school we had to remove him from. Weed central! It’s just funny to think about the days when schools created separate environments for smoking, since they knew kids were kids and you can’t control the beast of curiosity. I make a minor statement about the whole thing in the book, but I wrote it as people used it back then, only thing, I made totally different characters haunting the “lounge” to insert other types of people I knew around school. I never use actual friendships or relationships from my school days, though a handful of people who were real make it into the book under different names because they move the story along, color my world or had great impact upon me.

    I only smoked for a month after I’d had a bad string of luck with women following the breakup with my high school sweetheart. All just dumb drama teenagers must go through and ultimately becomes “meh, whatever” down the road and you have your life set. I was depressed, “wanting out,” and down on myself and then I realized how dumb I was being letting it all get to me and driving me to smoke. My father was a chain smoker and died of COPD, so I refused to become a slave to nicotine.

    I’m not into weed, either, though I read your recent post. Maryland also just legalized, so it’s a feeding frenzy right now. My fiancee and I use topical CBD oil and the stick version for sore joints and muscle inflammation. That’s about it.

    And this is actually my third book, though I don’t outright acknowledge my first novel, “Mentor,” because the publisher turned out to be b.s. My short story collection, “Coming of Rage,” is out right now through the same publisher, Raw Earth Ink. I get what you’re saying, though. It’s a wonderful feeling.

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