This interview was supposed to run at the end of the month, but they ran it, I guess, a few days ago. In it, I mention “1999” and refer people here to my website, where there is no mention of “1999” yet. 🙂 Details coming by the end of the month, which, ironically, was when this interview was due to run 🙂
I think I mention Milestone about 3,000 times. 🙂
This link is to Part 3, with links to the previous 2 parts.
Watch this space…
“1953 was a bad year for me: I died.” The narrator opened this way in an episode of the Goon Show, but then went on to explain that the night’s episode wasn’t about him.
In Priest’s second digital-release novel, Dual, the episode is about the dead narrator. And not in the usual “the narrator will now relate how they came to get killed, in flashback” sense either. The story moves forwards, and the dead guy plays omniscient 3rd person narrator, occasionally calling characters out on their BS. (Don’t worry about spoilers, none of the stuff I’m talking about here goes beyond “book jacket summary” revelations.)
Like Zion, it’s a gritty crime drama set in New York City and its surroundings, with characters who are all broken, flawed, or horrible in some way. Pegged to its original time-of-conception in 1994 by plot-important historical events, it’s a little more anachronistic than Zion was, but rarely to the point you’d really notice unless things like people extending the antennae on their cellphones bug you.
The Haitian origins of the main suspects (just because the narrator is the dead guy doesn’t mean he tells us who killed him right away!) are played up for both mundane and supernatural aspects. The generally realistic tone of the novel would normally make me assume (at my current position around the 40% mark of the story) that old man Witherspoon’s mask would be pulled off in the endgame and all the talk about loa and houngans would be just people being superstitious.
But, you know, DEAD GUY IS NARRATING. So all bets are off when it comes to the hoodoo.
So far, so good. (Warning: certain scenes are of a graphic sexual nature, probably not something you want to read when strangers or kids could read over your shoulder.)
I came this close to putting up a Facebook page over the weekend. I just can’t do it. FB is filled with the most ridiculous and banal yammering, embarrassing “look at me! Look at me!” pages bloated with selfies, stupid video, mindless chatter, and, of course, ads all over the place. I must be the crazy one: I can’t imagine why a billion people give up so much of themselves to what is, unquestionably, an enormous waste of time.
If even half the Americans on Facebook spent even a fraction of that time focused on America’s troubles, this country would be amazing. Facebook is the most insipid, narcissistic landscape of the stupid I have ever seen. I felt *soiled* just surfing around in it.
A murder mystery narrated by the victim, Dual: A Love Story concerns Gerry Martinez, a New York City police detective assigned to the Queens County Prosecutor’s Office, who is investigating the murder of a New York photographer, committed presumably by his wife. Complicating matters, the wife has a twin, a virtual clone down to her DNA, and the prosecution’s challenge is to definitively prove which of the exotically beautiful twins committed the murder. Gerry finds himself drawn into a deepening mystery involving a large, politically connected family hiding a closely-held secret they are all willing to lie and, possibly, kill to protect. Gerry runs afoul of the U.S. State Department and incurs the wrath of a mysterious death squad who come gunning for him as he begins to unravel the mystery the family is so determined to hide. In the midst of it all, Gerry finds himself inescapably drawn first to one of the twins, then the other; discovering that, to fall in love with one is to fall in love with them both. And, falling in love with them both can get you killed.
Themes: the meaning of family, the relevance of love, romantic police/crime drama. 92,000 words / 28 Chapters / 300 pages. Recommended for mature readers. Includes explicit language and sexual content.
This novel was inspired by the late Elmore Leonard’s eclectic humanism; a kind of gathering of imbeciles from which description the antihero himself is not excluded. As with my previous work, Zion, we again visit the theme of love—love as part of the supporting cast—and the myriad ways this particular form of insanity can derail lives or, in this specific case, entire countries. I am not, in any way, counting Mr. Leonard as any sort of peer; I am, after all, just a comic book guy stirring a toe in the pool of novelists. I’m just saying Leonard’s work is amazing fun and it is the voice I am, in my own way, echoing by this (literal) dead man’s tale.