TERENCE PATRICK HUGHES
Fiction and Plays
“His prose crackles with energy and a knack for capturing the absurdities of everyday life…a voice that is both satirical and deeply observant of the world.”
Matthew Johnson, Editor, The Portrait of New England Magazine
“Hughes’ writing is delightfully detailed yet familiar, his characters seemingly stolen from my childhood adventures on the other side of the train tracks. I can’t wait to see what he does next.”
J.B. Marlow, Editor, Rock Salt Literary Journal
latest work
“Brutally tense and wickedly funny, A Sin to Know is a breathless page-turner that cuts deep, lingers in the bones, and haunts the tender-hearted with a question: How far would we go for all the flawed humans we love?”
Sofie Justice Author of The Other Farmhouse Editor-in-Chief, Press Pause Press
A Sin to Know
When a teenager is killed in a hit-and-run on the outskirts of Rock Hollow, Maine, Sheriff Blake Buskin must piece together the investigation while his troubled family and town officials are pulling him apart.
But as the dead boy’s vengeful uncles head north to deliver their own justice, Blake must solve the case before the town’s grief erupts into violence.
Each new lead exposes darker secrets as the line between duty and survival begins to blur. By the time the truth surfaces, it may be too late for Blake to save his family or himself.
A Sin to Know is a bitingly suspenseful tale of small town justice and a morally complex family drama.
Terence Patrick Hughes crafts fiction and plays where humor and tragedy lean into each other, creating emotion that lingers long after the final line. His work explores the quirky, shifting fault lines of ordinary life — small ruptures exposing chasms of truth that swallow lives whole. With tales equally rooted in morality and chaos, Hughes invites readers into a world both unsettling and deeply human.
“The comic and the tragic lie inseparably close, like light and shadow.”
-SOCRATES“Terence Patrick Hughes has a knack for hilarity and heart in his writing. We love him.”
Kieran Cottrell, General Editor of Egg + Frog
short fiction
As The Night The Day
THE KID GOT HIT ON THE BRIDGE BY A VEHICLE. My first guess is a sedan or jeep, traveling at enough speed to knock him ten or so feet in the air and then into a tumble another fifteen down the embankment to the creek’s edge. A couple inches of early spring snow covered him up for a day or so, but even with the melt you could see by the streaks of blood running uphill that the boy tried to crawl for his life back up to the road.
So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star
CHARLIE DIBENIDETTO HAD MADE IT BIG. That’s what we’d say in the days before any of us ever gave anything a real try, except for Charlie, who was always plucking and strumming away at a guitar when we were kids. His family lived the next block over, on the top floor of a roughly aged three-tenement apartment stack, one of scores that lined the streets of our town, once a textile-mill mecca, now municipal sinkhole.
Standing on the Edge of Some Crazy Cliff
Portrait of New England page 65
IT ALL BEGAN WHEN MAZEL HUBBARD showed up at town hall for a school committee meeting. At first, it was to no one’s particular care or interest, she was just one of a half-dozen townsfolk spread across the ill-arranged metal folding chairs that sat before, but not near the two long, time-worn tables at which were seated the committee’s chairman and his cohorts.
Tom Tucker’s Dead Body
TOM TUCKER SAID HE SAW A DEAD BODY BUT when we got there it was gone. I had been minding my business that early evening outside of the house, transistor radio set against the top riser of the front steps, barely catching the signal of the Red Sox game with enough staticky in-and-out data for me to follow with limited frustration. Except, when there’s a hometown home run because it’s always “there’s a drive! . . . ckshckjk . . . way back, way back! . . . crshjkchchskch . . .” and by the time Coleman or Petrocelli’s call breaks through the garbled web of noise it’s too late, the batter’s rounding the bases, or by the deflated tone of Coleman, who seems to live and die with each blast, you know that it was caught on the warning track or at the wall, another spark of glory falling just short of its heroic potential.
A Real Stand Up Guy
THE GREEN ROOM AT LMAO IS NOT REALLY A ROOM AT ALL. It’s a 10 x 20 foot space sectioned off from backstage by musty drapery that often overlaps, making entry or escape a difficult endeavor. Yet, in either witty taste or cheapskate irony, the curtains are all green. At one end of this quasi-room is an old table upon which stand a half dozen plastic bottles of water, a box of snack-sized chips and a camping lamp. At the other, more shadowy side are six metal folding chairs, two of them presently occupied by the comic who had just come off stage after a bad set and the night’s headliner, Tony Starch.
Death Became Them
PLENTY OF FOLKS IN TOWN HAD DIED AT ALL AGES and all times of day or night, some gruesome, some passive, and every one of them referred to afterward as having been ‘too good’ or ‘too young’, or on rare occasions both. That’s what the attendees whispered to each other at the wakes and funerals that seemed to mount one upon the other in such quantity that many a mourner was forced to choose the departed friend or acquaintance who would garner most of their time on a particular evening, a choice which was most often swayed by the amount of liquor being served at each prospective parlor.
Hughes’s work “…explores heavy subject matter with humorous dialogue and strong characters”
-The New York Times
full length plays
Their Great Magic
A year ago, acclaimed American novelist, John Irwin, and his wife suffered a terrible car crash near their mountain-top home in Woodstock, NY. He survived, she did not. After months of mourning, insurance litigation, and tabloid harassment, Helen’s ghost has returned to constantly haunt John and keep him from writing, sleeping, and staying sober. His daughter, Violet, and her new boyfriend arrive to try and rescue John from his downward spiral, only to be caught up in a wild war of words and wit that reaches far beyond our material world. A comic romp of a ghost story wrapped around a drama about love, death, and family.
American Yu
A Chinese dissident arrives at a small Minnesota college to begin teaching American Literature, when a campus speech by the state’s Governor is interrupted by a minor riot. The backlash that ensues against a troubled student pits politicians against the school’s administration as well as the new, outspoken professor. A play about politics, race, and other absurd conditions of democracy.
Finding the Roosters
The story, set in mid-1960s New England, follows the disintegration and rebuilding of the Fine family. Richard and Evelyn are in the middle of a nasty divorce brought on by Evelyn's alcoholism and Richard's emotional distance after the death of their elder son in the war. Their younger son Oscar has taken the death hard as well, becoming fascinated by Holden Caulfield and wearing his dead brother's army jacket. Unable to deal with the boy, Richard decides to have him disassembled, literally, and shipped to a military school.
children’s plays
The Tempest
A comic Shakespeare adaptation
PROSPERO: “So be prepared for an amazing journey, for our tale is not only one of sorcery but also an innocent love story and if that were not enough to cover the price of admission, we add a good dose of politics to guarantee division.”
19 characters. 11M, 6F, 2Either; 53 pages in length. Approximately 45-60 minutes running time.
A Midsummer Camp’s Dream
A comic Shakespeare adaptation
Deep in the Catskill mountains, Camps Bluster and Hill-a-Wee are sent into chaos as Theseus arrives to announce that he’s bought the land and must close one of the camps to make way for his new wife’s mansion and horse farm. His son Demetrius and fellow camper Lysander must now lead the boys in a winner take all talent show against the girls, led by Hermia and Helena, to determine which camp must close. All the while, King Oberon is vexed by his queen and sets his trusty aid, Puck, to scatter magic, confusion, and a good dose of laughs across the forest. A Midsummer Camp’s Dream is a very modern adaptation of the Shakespeare classic for kids of all ages, written in free verse with almost 100% new dialogue.
17-19 characters. 60 minutes running time.
Doc Faustus
A comic spin on Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus
It’s 1984 and Doc Faustus is the most awkward and bullied teen at Hope High until he meets the demon Mephistopheles and sells his soul in exchange for knowledge and fame. When Doc learns that his actions have turned the school upside-down and endangered his friends, he fights to reverse the curse by learning to love himself and others. This comedic spin on Christopher Marlowe’s classic is a delightful play for the entire family and offers a large, zany cast of both mortal and supernatural characters.
19 Characters Run time: 65 minutes
about
Terence Patrick Hughes writes fiction that leans into the absurdity, morality, and quiet brutality of being human. His recent short stories appear in Press Pause Press, Rock Salt Journal, Portrait of New England, and Egg+Frog. A Sin to Know is his debut novel.
Hughes is also an accomplished playwright whose work has been produced on five continents. His stage pieces blend wit and darkness in ways that prompted The New York Times to note that his writing “explores heavy subject matter with humorous dialogue and strong characters.”
A novelist and playwright with a distinct dramedy sensibility, Hughes builds worlds where relationships unravel, absurdity lurks just under the surface, and the emotional stakes stay sharp. Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, he lives with his wife and two children in Woodstock, New York.
