BIG NEWS!
My new novel, Fester Descent, is available now in paperback, eBook and audiobook.
This is the sequel to fan-favorite Fester, set twenty years after the events of the first book:
Twenty years after Fester, the town is still running on inertia and bad decisions. Everyone assumes things will work themselves out. They never do.
Bolly Bollinger is trying to keep his father’s auto shop afloat while the town’s last old-money family keeps raising the rent. His stress relief is a local tradition known as a “zoo run.” He roars past the Schmidt mansion at top speed, flips off history, and pretends that counts as control. One night, the response is a gunshot. Bolly survives, but the consequences don’t stop there.
When Candy Troutman—an informant at Mike’s Place, Fester’s notorious brothel—is found murdered in her bathtub, Chief Constable Martin Prieboy moves to contain the damage. He wants answers quickly, order restored, and the town reassured. Instead, he gets a case that resists simplicity and rewards the wrong assumptions.
As the investigation tightens, Fester looks elsewhere. A failing shopping mall stumbles into viral fame after a Fourth of July Fun Fair triggers supposed hauntings and an influx of ghost hunters. The events may even involve a long-dead Native American. No one agrees. Everyone has an opinion.
Meanwhile, a volatile heir to a dying dynasty retreats into weapons, paranoia, and his three pet monkeys. A disgraced former chief isolates himself with a Vietnam-era tank. The town keeps moving, convinced that spectacle counts as progress.
Caught between economic pressure, civic certainty, and a system that refuses to slow down, Bolly and Martin find themselves on opposite sides of momentum that no longer cares who gets crushed. Fester Descent is a darkly comic crime novel about small-town justice, institutional stubbornness, and the comfort of bad answers. Savage, satirical, and escalating with gleeful inevitability, it proves that in Fester, the truth isn’t hidden—it’s just less entertaining than the alternative.
The Devil Box
How about that description? Did you like it or dislike it? More importantly, did it make you want to buy and read the book?
I’ve been very leery of AI for a long time. Anything that made Stephen Hawking nervous seemed a good thing to approach with extreme caution. Therefore, I was never particularly interested in finding out much about it. Sure, people on my social media feeds were posting all manner of interesting images, animations and music. There was a time – and it doesn’t seem like it was that long ago, but it probably was – that I would have been all over those toys. But the older I get, the more of the ornery Luddite comes out in me. Perhaps it because, having experienced it from inception to now, I can see how the promise of the internet devolved to a rage-click disinformation engine. Rant! Rave! Kinds these days! With their hair and their music! Etc.
Of course, my attitude softened when it became apparent I could use ChatGPT to help me with something I really dislike doing: marketing my own novels. Specifically, coming up with blurbs for Amazon and other advertising platforms. This is like pulling teeth, and most authors I know despise it. How do you encapsulate a 100,000-word story that you’ve spent months if not years laboring over, and condense it into two paragraphs? And do so in a way that will help twig Amazon’s algorithms and quickly engage the interest of potential readers? Usually, it’s a numb slog of writing and re-writing the same hundred words – a dreary task at best.
My wife had been using ChatGPT to help her job search, so the Devil Box had already gained admission to the household noosphere. She had been having good success in crafting resumes and cover letters. As anyone who has searched for a job in the last decade or so would know, the trick is getting past the resume-screening algorithms and get your credentials in front of a person. Use an algorithm to beat an algorithm – seems like a fair trade.
It wasn’t too far of a hop to figure that ChatGPT should be able to help get a leg up on the Amazon algorithms as well, so I fed in the text for the back-cover blurb I had already written, as well as the major plot points of the story that I thought would pique a reader’s interest. It took a little bit of massaging, but I eventually came up with the little gem you see above. Time will tell whether the Devil Box will actually help me sell more books.
There’s more to be said on the use of AI in writing, but I think that can wait for another post. Right now, I’m way into Larry McMurtry’s Streets of Laredo, and want to get to the end of that puppy.
