Novels and Short Stories

 Oskar Submerges is the first true sea novel ever set on a Jovian satellite. The interplanetary year is 2193. With the help of a massive inheritance, Cletus II of Luna, aspiring kapellmeister, has taken a job as a janitor in an infamous brain health clinic on Europa, ice world of entheogens and polysexual cyborgs, seeking inspiration and artistic actualization in the abjection to be gained from proximity to end-of-life patients. Cletus soon befriends Oskar, an aged paper architect who suffers from an endemic neurological disease, aka “french maids,” which is contracted by those exposed to the bioluminescent blue-green algae native to the subsurface ocean. In a series of increasingly-disorienting psychotic episodes, Cletus attempts to ethically navigate the Zoroastrian sex politics of this kinky new world and learn to love more perfectly before going insane, not understanding that love is the madness madder than the rest. 

 Pendulum Pet is a romp through the vicissitudes of a gregarious advanced culture with too much time, information and technology on its hands. Paranoia is placed and misplaced, the devious succeed through manipulations of those who gaze in wonder at the mundane like chimps on acid, or fail when the truly bizarre and unthinkable inadvertently stand in their way. Civilizations clash, as they will, when Metaore, a transnational mining corporation headed by CEO Budd Dimples, purchases a field behind Boris and Beeba’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Tavern, a cult concert venue and meeting place of an eclectic collection of feckless artists, in order to undertake a remarkable experiment: drilling a geopunctural borehole to heal the Earth. Budd has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and taken a sudden turn toward esoteric wisdom, much encouraged by his healer and sex therapist Ashtara Wolf. Bogomyr Yadvig, one of the more outré of the regulars, lives in a tent nearby with Rex the tavern hound – his idea of communing with Greek Cynics in preparation for an upcoming performance piece. He has cause to lose sleep and accumulate suspicion that the corporation has nefarious unstated ends in mind, particularly when he has his Roswell moment, if that is indeed what it is. The corporate endeavour comes to a sudden halt when their drill runs into an impenetrable barrier, leading to mutually unfortunate and potentially combustible discoveries, along with stunning truths about parallel evolution and devolution. Yes, the world of the techno-information age has gone mad and survival may very well depend on the whims of a pendulum pet. Please note that this novel is adult, poignant satire. As such it contains explicit language, sex scenes, politically incorrect depictions, and may be offensive to the more irritable readers. Even though the work is part of a series, the story is self-contained and can be read independently of the other Cynicism Management Series novels. It also includes links to free music by the fictional musicians appearing in the story - to the actual soundtrack for this literary work. 

 The old lady sits and thinks. People come to her. Life on Earth is over. (Unbeknown to her, Earth cleanup has been going on for 100 years.) She has signed up for a new beginning on Mars. She talks to herself and her nurse about the life she is leaving. Wild imaginings. She knows she will be useful. She wants to be useful. Not hateful. Not mean.

Our Mars facilitator spills his guts. The project is complete. He is given permission to admit to the sham the Mars project has become. Bring in the candidates. Plug them. Clean them up in every way. Earth goes through spotty but effective cleanup. New and improved Earthlings are returned to do it all again. 

 See Bushra Batal, talented but driftless data analyst from Albania coding away in an American mega-city where self-driving cars are matter-of-fact and virtual reality is on the cusp of widespread embrace. Strange things have begun to happen at her office that autumn. It is a season characterized by dissonance between technology and humanity, by her past in the east and an off-key present in the west. Just when she finally wraps her fingers around a career break Bushra has spent her whole adult life working towards, bombshell corruption scandals plunge the city into violent unrest and drag her into an absurd and sinister world of holograms, private detectives, street riots, cryptocurrencies, coverups, AI, and the shadowy bodies that pull all these strings unseen. 

 She Sang to Them, She Sang is a satirical dark comedy that offers a critique of modern capitalism, real estate speculation, and personal isolation. The story takes place in the fictional Ontario town of Orangefield, an ostensibly quiet community located about 90 minutes east of Toronto.

The book explores the lives of characters who struggle to find genuine human connection or authenticity while trapped in an environment dominated by the accumulation of capital, brand culture, and lifestyleism. The work leans heavily into dark, psychological, and socioeconomic satire—about issues overlooked, upkeep not kept up, or damage concealed; about how more than finances flow from one generation to the next; about veiled motivations for entering into relationships of a contractual nature (be they fiduciary, informal, or solemnized); finally, about the real origins of these stories themselves, which upon closer inspection are revealed to be mere lean-tos built upon shabby foundations, and whose parlors furnish-forth tedious after-dinner speakers, who are not only the most long-winded, but also the most unreliable, of guests.

Through an innovative presentation of events (in which thoughts nested within and discoursing with other thoughts are “corralled” visually on the page), the narrative moves from one perspective to the next as each protagonist somehow manages to convince themselves of their autonomy, even as this most seemingly banal of events, the simple sale of a house, gathers to itself enough psycho-kinetic energy to threaten all who find themselves in need of shelter under its creaking joists. 

Sister Carrie is a first novel by a writer possessing such an original voice and slashing, surrealistic wit that she is sure to take her place at the forefront of cutting-edge fiction writers. Carrie Meeber leaves her stifling Florida home for Chicago, where she enters the related fields of advertising and prostitution. As an unflappable narrator makes inquiries into her bizarre life, a cartoonish, hyperkinetic, blaring street world envelops the reader.

Depraved characters parade themselves and their crass literary leanings; many keep journals, out of which Carrie is revealed with stylistic pyrotechnics. Fairbanks's scrappy, fantastic, debauched characters reveal themselves as well in hot rapid monologue and dialogue.

There is something of Kathy Acker in Sister Carrie, something of Ronald Firbank, William Burroughs, Mark Leyner perhaps, even the Joyce of Finnegans Wake. (And Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie revamped, accessorized, given riot grrrl attitude.) But it is finally a tour de force from a young woman writer with a voice all her own and a sardonic worldview perfect for the irony-clad nineties.

Bib is a mute, reclusive philosophy student with a compulsive addiction to reading. Hiding from society in an underground apartment, Bib scribbles his bizarre dreams that happen to coincide with the sudden disappearance of those around him. Gradually, Bib is forced out of his underworld to investigate an absent civilization, one where only the poor and social outcasts run free, where the city has reverted to an anarchic state of nature.

Flipping between Bib’s scribbled “dream diaries” and the novelized collapse of the modern world as told in footnotes by The Society of Bibliophiles, Solarium creates an atmosphere that seeks to bend the mind in the search for the body. The world of Solarium depicts a degenerative society, with themes of racial guilt, sexuality, and trauma...

 Weeks before Poppy is set to migrate to the human colony on Mars, their mother, Arthemise, takes them for one last voyage to visit the floating homestead on the Henderson Swamp where they were raised. On an Earth where to survive in Louisiana in the summer, one must wear a Dune-like body cooling suit, a much-needed family getaway that couldn't possibly last long enough soon becomes an eternity they can't escape when a geomagnetic solar storm powerful enough to produce widespread voltage collapse happens to coincide with a precipitous tropical system of the sort increasingly common not only along the marshy coasts of North America but uniformly and sporadically across the globe. 

 This is a remarkable collection of rich, up-to-date, and astonishingly original short stories, a body of ten unsparing and implacable narratives, each with a different setting and plot – the reprisal for a bitter event in the fourth grade; a hot dog vendor's one nemesis in New York City; an account of several hair-raising murders in Maine; a prep school teacher plagued by a revengeful former student, and several other tales (but not all) culled from his razor-sharp memory of hurtful personal moments based on his own life. This is a book to be placed fittingly with two other assemblages of his truly memorable short stories, his Early Stories (2021) and Later Stories (2022). 

 This book consists of two novels by David Vardeman written ten years apart. Suddenly, this Summer is a dark mystery; April is the Cruelest Month is a dark farce. The change is not in Vardeman at all. As you read either of the two novels, the Vardeman of the other novel is lurking, and maybe laughing … even scoffing.

Suddenly, this Summer, turns you into an intelligent beetle and sets you free to roam the mind of Roberta Sookey, Iowa librarian, fat woman, woman beset by tragic circumstance, iron lady, proto-feminist, fearless, with the moves of a boxer or ice skater and a mind like a patch of ice she didn’t see coming. Your time inside her head will change nothing outside your door.

April is the Cruelest Month may be the cruelest book. But you will laugh at it, and therein is your complicity. Eddie P’Poole strangled his mother and then shot himself, and there you sit reading and laughing. What kind of monster are you? 

David Vardeman has become known as a genius of the short form; the short form, for Vardeman being any length from a few pages to a few hundred, in the case of this book hovering about 100 or so for the first four stories and 20 or so for the last story--Vardemanian humor implicit in the title Zeitgeist being given less shrift than, say, the story Corn, the second longest in the book ("Watering corn was their code, in social situations, for needing to urinate, no delay.") Here's a typical Vardemanian moment, chosen at random: "Sometimes, Irv, you just want the naked man out of your house." Vardeman is genius of the mundane absurd. 

 Ludivine is the heroine of this postmodern novel. SUPERPOWER(S.) contains a screenplay within a novel. In this novel, Ludivine provides her commentary on the filming of her screenplay, which consists of her life in her own words. The action transports the reader in time and space, popping back and forth from France in 1944 to the Vatican, to more recent NYC fashion world and Pakistan. All it takes is a little superpower from Ludivine.
Ticking all the boxes:
• An eccentric jittery QUEENDOM
• MAJOR MOTION PICTURE with famous actors vying for roles
• SUPERPOWERS
• LOVE
• France • Vatican City • Italy • NYC • Scranton, PA
• SCREENPLAY within a NOVEL
• CAST OF THOUSANDS: Lourdes • Glastonbury • Burning Man
• TERRORIST twist
• KIDNAPPING angle
• A DISFIGUREMENT tale: with a magical superpower cure
Our flirtatious nonagenarian protagonist makes a major historical dent in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. 

 Dr. Ed's head is spinning: a long-lost 'son' has just been sent over to his office by the temp agency, his shopping-addicted wife seems to have disappeared, and the clinical trial that he is running for a revolutionary new anti-depressant might well be going off the rails. But Dr. Ed is in control of everything, including himself.

Thus begins "Skinner Boxed", the first of two thematically linked novellas that comprise White Mythology. In the second piece, "Love's Alchemy", five narrators deliver stories of betrayal that are nested like Russian dolls, stories that span an attempted seduction in Tokyo in 1987 back to a brotherly schism that erupted during a bottle rocket game of "war" in 1970s Massachusetts.