Local news covering Laurel Lakes, Victoria Falls, Oakcrest, Montpelier, and the Route 197 corridor
Montpelier Woods Resident’s Fear of Snakes Leads to First Novel
Selwyn Griffith has a vivid memory of an encounter with a snake when he was young and living in his native Trinidad and Tobago. At about age 10, he was playing in the yard after a rainfall and saw a beautiful snake, about a foot long. He tried to put the snake into a bottle to show his family, but his brother saw him and yelled at him to run away from the snake immediately. “They later told me that it was a coral snake, and if I had been bitten, I could have died,” Griffith says.
That event instilled in Griffith a deep-seated, lifelong fear of snakes. So, it might seem odd that he wrote his first novel, Carnage at Ross Park Zoo, about a deadly snake that escapes from a zoo and terrorizes a community. “My thought was, if I could study snakes, maybe it would help control my fear of them,” he says. Hold that thought...
Griffith grew up with 11 siblings. Looking for some solo adventures and a change of scenery, he was accepted by the University of Wisconsin. Having applied sight unseen, his arrival marked his first time in the United States. He says that he picked Wisconsin because he had never seen snow and he knew that it snowed there. He went on to graduate school in Ithaca, New York (another snowy spot). After achieving his Master’s degree, he embarked on a 38-year career as a cardiac physiologist at United Health Services in Binghamton. “I worked primarily in cardiac rehab,” he says. “We treated everything from angina to heart transplants.” Along the way, Griffith married his sweetheart, Janice, and they have been married an impressive 51 years. After he retired in 2014, they stayed in Binghamton for a while but then moved to their current home in South Laurel’s Montpelier Woods neighborhood to be near their two daughters, both of whom graduated from the University of Maryland at College Park. One daughter still lives in Laurel, while the other moved to Boston.
A self-described avid reader, Griffith also likes to exercise. He works out several times a week at the Laurel-Beltsville Senior Center. He also enjoys photography and travel—hobbies that combined nicely during a 20-day trip to Europe and an 18-day foray through the American West, where he and Janice visited “eight or nine beautiful states.” They also occasionally return to Trinidad to visit family.
Griffith says he first got the idea for his debut novel’s plot when he lived a block away from the Ross Park Zoo in Binghamton. He could sometimes hear the animals there, including the eerie howling of monkeys.
“I started wondering what would happen if any of the animals would ever escape. My imagination took off from there, and I decided to write about a dangerous snake, based on my own childhood experience. I knew it would have to be a big snake, so I started researching them.” Ultimately, Griffith decided to set his novel in the Ross Park Zoo and the surrounding area. “The zoo is real. All the streets are real. The descriptions of the town are real. The only part that isn’t real is the snake—I’m not even sure if they ever had any giant snakes there.”
In Carnage at Ross Park Zoo, the small zoo seizes an opportunity to take possession of a giant, 980-pound reticulated python captured on the island of Java. With visions of a python exhibit drawing visitors in huge numbers, the zoo finds itself the center of attention upon the snake’s arrival on a flatbed truck. However, things go bad quickly when the snake escapes and, hungry and cold, starts feeding on susceptible pets and townspeople. Griffith chose to write the book in a way that the reader knows why animals and people start disappearing—in fact, some of the narrative is written from the snake’s point of view as it hunts its prey—while the characters in the story are oblivious to the fact that the escaped python is responsible for the disappearances; having been led to believe that it had perished in the cold of the upstate New York winter. A subplot involves the wrongful arrest of a local man on murder allegations, driven by pressure from the mayor and city council, who don’t want the issue of serious crime to get in the way of their upcoming re-election bids.
Griffith says that he purposefully “set up a human villain” to divert the townspeople’s attention from the escaped python and to also set up a parallel between the police manhunt for a suspect in the disappearances and the python’s hunt for its next meal. No spoilers here on how the story ends, but suffice it to say that readers might be looking over their shoulders at every rustle they hear in their backyard for quite some time after reading the book.
Although Griffith wrote the book as a challenge to himself and didn’t originally intend to publish it, his daughter encouraged him to do so. She served as editor, and the cover illustration was created by Griffith’s grandson, then-15-year-old John Torres, Jr. The book currently is available on Amazon.com in digital form.
Griffith plans to continue writing, and already has two more books in the works. One will be a mystery, and the other will be based on current affairs.
So, did writing Carnage help ease Griffith’s fear of snakes? He laughs at that question. “No, it really didn’t. I still don’t like snakes. At all.”
South Laurel Restaurant Updates
At long last, the Checkers on Route 1 opened in late November. It’s located on the northbound side, nestled between Nuzback’s Bar and Patriot Healthcare.
Amigo’s Tex-Mex held its grand opening on December 8. It took over the spot where Appleby’s used to be in Contee Crossing Shopping Center.
CAVA Mediterranean restaurant has a “coming soon” sign in the door of the back part of the building where Potbelly used to be (RIP); the front part is a dental practice.
The Cakery Café is coming soon to the building that used to be Einstein’s Bagels—nee the Toddle House, for longtime residents.
What’s the Scoop?
South Laurel residents: I want to hear from you! Let’s turn this column into a place of celebration for residents of the Prince George’s County section of South Laurel. Tell me about milestone birthdays, anniversaries, honor roll students, church events ... just remember, we publish in January, April, July, and December, so plan ahead for when you want your news to be published.
Diane Mezzanotte holds a Journalism degree from Penn State University. She retired from the Department of Defense in 2019, following a 34-year career.
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