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About
the Author
 I’m
older. That is a fact. Wiser? That is often debatable. Now that
I’ve arrived at the legally magical age of sixty-five, I
carry a Medicare card in my wallet and can claim eligibility for
the
innumerable museum and tourist discounts available to me simply
because I lived long enough.
Just
before the pandemic, I retired after fifteen years as a high school
science teacher. I did other jobs before that, but none was as
worthy. Except when I served as a junior officer in the United
States Coast Guard. With retirement, however, it dawned on me
that I needed to do something with this time.
Take
it from a science teacher. The second law of thermodynamics requires
an increase in entropy over time; that is, an increase in disorder
and randomness of the matter and energy of the universe. Meaning
with every action I take, at any time, in my body and within my
surrounding environment, I break down complex things into simpler
things. Things must fall
apart. In other words, I get older. Same goes for you. No exceptions.
Entropy
is, in a word, a bitch.
So,
I could wait for entropy to do its thing, leading to the inevitable
knee or hip replacements and countless other medical procedures
and maladies. Or I could do something I always wanted to do before
I couldn’t. I decided to write this story, my debut novel.
I’ve
been trying to pigeonhole it into an accepted genre of fiction.
Dystopian? Yes, there’s a good deal of that. I don’t
end civilization in a nuclear war or with a virus that leads us
to zombies, extinction or vampirism. Thriller? Check that box
too. Military with a bit of spy stuff? Got it. Political? Definitely.
I’ve settled on this: political horror. Without supernatural
demons. We’ve managed to elect enough perfectly natural and
mortal demons already. The
horror of this story is that it is plausible. Maybe all that genre
stuff isn’t important to you, the reader.
I hope you will like this story. I hope you will believe losing
our democracy
could really happen. I pray it never does.
Almost forgot. Let me end this part the way authors are supposed
to end
this part.
I
live in Rhode Island with Cathy, my wife of forty-two years. I
could not have done this without her encouragement and her help
in reviewing my drafts. She is the most brilliant person I have
ever known. She is also the love of my life.
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