Water In Darkness opens in the late 1980s in the last months of Jack Tyne’s enlistment in the US Army. Jack is a young soldier haunted by the anonymous death of his father in Vietnam, and by childhood memories of watching his stepfather molest his sister. On the evening before his discharge from the Army, Jack covers his ears and hides in self-loathing while an effeminate soldier, also orphaned by Vietnam, takes a beating. Jack ultimately returns home to Illinois and wanders amongst the ruins of steel mills long gone South, only to discover the same frustrated America which had forced his escape into the Army. He drifts north to Chicago and works odd jobs, hoping to beat the memories, evade conscience, and become invisible. There he meets Danny Morrison, a Vietnam veteran dismissed from the Chicago Police Department for cocaine abuse. This violent, dispossessed man, filled with his own strange lusts, becomes a surrogate father for Jack, quickly pulling him into the dark heart of America’s violent culture. Heir to the impressionistic tradition of Ernest Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy, Buckman uses psychological landscapes and terse dialogue to tell his story of the skeletons of Vietnam.