Not With a Bang

Not with a Bang is a story about the invention of a new revolutionary weapon and how it completely destabilizes an already unstable near future America. In the satirical tradition of writers such as Charles Dickens, Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Wolfe, this novel features characters such as a white vigilante appliance repairman, a Vietnamese abducted bride and her abductor haunted by ghosts, a black youth gang practicing voodoo, Adolf Hitler’s son, lesbian mad scientists and even Arab terrorists. Drawing from the mythology and folklore of several cultures, just like America itself, it is a darkly humorous romp through our deepest fears of weapons proliferation and vengeance gone berserk.

This is a book of paradoxes: funny yet frightening, vulgar yet intellectual, extreme yet now common-place. It is an attempt to chronicle the conflicting voices and mythologies that make up 21st century America: a melting pot that may just be melting.

I currently teach (can you guess?) college writing, but have also taught courses in literature, mythology and folklore, film, media studies and communication. I am also a professional musician and recording engineer with a number of albums of ballroom music under the name Lunamoon, and an album of soundtrack music under the name Trips, available on iTunes, Amazon and other on-line stores, just like my self-published novel Not with a Bang.

Not with a Bang has a strange and rather sad history. I wrote virtually the entire novel in the mid to late 1990’s, but put it away for 10 years after 9/11 because I felt that the racial, cultural and gender hatred and conflicts I depict in the novel were no longer pertinent, since it seemed that the nation was ready to unify against a common enemy. Unfortunately, this novel has become a work of uncanny prophesy. It may surprise some readers to know that I wrote the elementary school shooting chapter PRIOR to the Columbine shootings in 1999 and first grader Dedrick Owens’ shooting of a classmate a year later. I also wrote the scene where the terrorists plan to use weaponized anthrax PRIOR to the anthrax attack just after 9/11. I sincerely hope that the race war I depict near the end of this novel will not come true, and that is the primary reason I have published this novel now. It was believed by many cultures that the gift of prophesy was in fact a curse from the Gods, and I’m beginning to believe that.