His newly released novel “The Animals” has been featured in the Sacramento Bee and was reviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle and by the author of “California” Edan Lepucki who was interviewed on the Colbert Report.

Christian Kiefer is an English professor here at American River College and he described his new novel as being “a literary thriller.”

Kiefer started writing this novel two years ago and said he commits anywhere from one to 10 hours of writing per day.

“It’s about a guy trying to atone for some really bad decisions he made in his life,” Kiefer said.

The novel also poses a lot of ethical questions.

“It asks how to be a good person and some life or death questions,” Kiefer said.

During the writing process Kiefer always has inspirational music on and for this novel it wasn’t any different.

“I listened to a lot of John Lee Hooker and Miles Davis while writing  ”The Animals,” said Kiefer.

The protagonist talks to himself in the second person point of view and because of this he described the narrators voice as being a little shifty.

Novel writing isn’t anything new to Kiefer.

“19 or 20 I started writing my first novel … I’m like a long distance runner when it comes to writing,” said Kiefer.

Currently he is 700 pages into another novel that he said will be around 1000 pages entitled “Kingdom of Wolves” about European cartography at the beginning of the century.

Fellow English professor and co-worker Michael Spurgeon spoke very highly of Kiefer’s new novel.

“He is a crazy good writer and I really think this book is going to put him over the top,” said Spurgeon.