"We know how to send our young to war. We know to welcome them back with parades, garlands, and trumpets. We have never known how to bring home their hearts and souls." - DC Fidler, September 2011 A novel based on DC Fidler's award winning play Boogieban.
Twenty-year-old Angus endures Daugherty, North Carolina, a small town dominated by two businesses: pickles and roses. Outsiders are unwelcome. Even crows are chased away with small fertilizer bombs. A railroad track running along main street, divides people enswathed in peculiarities, buried secrets, gossip, racism, conspiracies, unrequited love, and a plethora of horrific wrongs. Angus attempts to balance madness by spinning on the playground merry-go-round. One summer day, a brother-sister duo appears and sets up a taco stand beside the courthouse. "Do you prefer spicy or not spicy?"
Inside my head is ugly. Unrelenting wars between dreams, imagination, memories and invading demons. Explained by a navy doctor. “Seaman? You have multiple devils dancing in your head.”I hear chants. Began when I was five.I won’t tell you what my head sailors chant. You would fear me. If I authored those chants, I would fear me.But I’m not author.I’m recipient.
In 1988, an Arizona judge orders a kid from a Crips Gang to be flown to an Alutiiq village on Kodiak Island for rehabilitation. Not only is the remote area at the end of the world, there are rumors that giant, hairy, Ahulaq creatures wander the mountain snows, snatching young women who wander from the village.
A fifteen-year-old boy with loss of movement and sensation in his right side, is adopted from a Catholic orphanage by an elderly woman. The woman lived a reclusive life as a physician and brilliant medical researcher. During seven years of living together, they discovered one another to have spectacular research talents and set out to discover if they could invade animal and human minds to learn what it is like to know others from within. Will they use such research for altruistic or selfish explorations?
A play: A street youth is afraid of everything, including yellow school buses. He has never been outside of Pittsburgh and is desperate to find his mother. With no real plan, he impulsively carjacks a depressed fracking CEO driving a Mercedes. He points his antique gun at the driver and tells him to drive to Chicago. Because that might be the city where his mother is. Or maybe not.