Cheerful Monday News!

The next career benchmark, a manuscript request from one of the major publishing houses for DOGS OF PARSONS HOLLOW, has now occurred! Let’s hope the reader on the other end is as moved by the story as others have been.

For those following my career, DOGS was designed and written to make a connection in a much more universal way with readers than either King’s Highway or Fellow Traveler, with their somewhat narrow narrative scopes concerning specific memories of a time and place or of a particular (though fictionalized) rock band and its unique followers, could ever hope to achieve. In this next novel I consider that a good measure of decency may be made from how we treat our fellow planetary inhabitants in the form of animals, whether we consider them as partners or playthings, as possessing of the same divine spark as ourselves, or as lesser beings existing somehow apart from the great animating spirit in a way that we as human beings do not. It’s a thought-provoking theme, I hope.

I really believe that DOGS could certainly be not only a conversation starter and WOM success—in the end it’s a rip-snorting, terrifying action sequence for fifty brutal pages, and hard to put down—but an international and perhaps movie success as well. It’s also a didactic novel, one written with the intention of shining some purifying light on the ugly and atavistic ‘sport’ of dogfighting, which is a stain on our culture in the South and elsewhere in this country and world, so for that reason alone I’d like to see it go as big as possible. Maybe we can entertain with this project, but also do some good.