Winter of a Fighting Life; Q&A with Author James LaFond

Note to readers:

Winter of a Fighting Life is James's "kinetic memoir," a walk, at times a shuffle, down through the memories of his relentlessly tested and injured earthly coil. The book includes several pictures of the rarely seen author. Readers with a medical background may take interest in the photos as well.

LL: James, this book starts out as a humorous medical diary and reminiscence. How do you stay so sanguine about the damage you have suffered and the ongoing pain you deal with?

JL: The pain of a man’s damaged tendons, ligaments and nerves are nothing compared to the pain of being a soft little boy unable to preserve even a shred of autonomy in the face of a bullying world of sadistic teens and adults. I can only imagine how much more it would hurt to be a soft, helpless man and that cures me of second guessing my combative pursuits.

LL: I can't detect any trace of self pity in the telling of these injuries, especially notable in the cases where you weren't asking for it (when you were attacked at work or injured in the course of your work). How does the ability to recount your struggles without a tone of complaint fit into the masculine virtues?

JL: The discipline of accepting the outcome of combat is ancient and is pursued by me in my writing as a means of self-teaching. The writing helps relieve the nagging doubts. Placing myself in perspective as an idiot kid who didn’t see it coming helps round out the experience which becomes part of the evolving self.

LL: I want to explore the nature of different masculine relationships, which are mostly hidden from me, but which I find fascinating and without which a man's life would surely be missing something of great value.

There were many passages that struck me as meaningful, particularly those with your brother, your BB gun battles, Lions and Tigers, and of course your one great fight with him. You emerged from that fight with a lifelong truce and friendship.

You have also written many times about the Banno family, and this passage about a match with Dante illustrates the relationship between youth and respected elder so beautifully:

Dante said, from the not so cozy confines of our bloody clinch, “What are you doin’ Mister Jim? You’re fouling me.”
I growled, “And when I’m done thumbin’ yah I’m tossin’ yer ass down the stairwell!”
“Why Mister Jim?”
“Because yer killin’ me kid!”
Dante then broke the clinch and said to the gathered witnesses, “I quit; I’m done—draw. Anybody else wanna go?”

Has your combat practice brought you deeper into these relationships than might otherwise have been, especially given your Taboo nature?

JL: This past weekend I met two emasculated young men who fairly winced at my presence as if the testosterone wafting off of my heavy brow ridge and back hair might poison them. In this and many work and social situations I come off and feel like a relative badass. But among fighting men, men who were trained and born to fight, I am a fourth rate physical specimen. The only area, as a fighter, in which I rate as formidable is the psychological one. This has been ingrained in my through competing and training with real “studs” like Dante, and has shown me my place, as a fringe character, an adviser, an interloper, a coach, a trainer, a scout, a writer. I’m enough of a man that the truly bad men respect me, but not so caught up in physicality and ego that I can’t bridge the emasculation gap to the drones of the Dark Mother. I am also better at adapting than more formidable men because I’m used to working from a poor leverage position. The fighting arts have taken me from castoff and tormented nerd to alienated whack-job young man to crackpot old man. The prerequisite of being a taboo man is lethality. I have developed that. The prime requisite is alienation which God gifted me with when he set me apart and beneath the rest of my kind.

LL: I want to tie this in to your recent writings on The Vile Root. Without spoiling the book for readers, I want to ask you if some validation or support from your family might have changed the course of your fighting career? Would it be reasonable to wonder if they had taken an interest in your pursuits, that you might have been satisfied sooner, and changed course to seek other activities? Or were you destined to live this Fighting Life?

JL: What my family was drove me to the fighting path. Their support may have resulted in me going to college and becoming some repellent cipher or a scholar. I am lucky that my family swallowed the Great Lie with such gusto that it repelled me and set me on my way. Physically, I never possessed a pro quality body, which meant that I would accomplish less and stay in it longer, which is a not unremarkable pattern. Few coaches excelled at a pro level and few pros excel at coaching. Also, where the accomplished elite fighter shies away from humiliating himself by showcasing his diminished ability, the mediocre fighter often gets better as he ages since his entire game is skill and learning, so he is tempted to hang around, knowing he’s better than he was when he was young.

LL: Thank you, James.

There are three ways you can own "Winter of a Fighting Life," as a PDF directly from the author, in paperback or Kindle edition:

PDF at JL store

Paperback

Kindle

(c) 2017 James LaFond & Lynn Lockhart

When You're Food by James LaFond

When You're Food, A Fighter's View of Predatory Aggression is the classic Harm City title from James LaFond.  Step into the feral predatory matrix of 21st century Baltimore, as only a trained fighter living as a pedestrian resident and worker can show it to you.

Engaging urban survival guide, brutal oral history and outrageous memoir, this disturbing book makes the case that civilization is a lie, human society is essentially cannibalistic, and you are on the menu. If you like Harm City you will love this; it's LaFond at his most politically incorrect.
Amazon (paperback):  When You're Food

James LaFond store (pdf version):  When You're Food

Daughters of Moros by James LaFond

Daughters of Moros is a collection of one short story and two novelettes.  Reader Garren has left the following illuminating 5-star review at Amazon: "This book was everything I expected."  Pick up the paperback at the link below and experience the satisfaction of your literary expectations today!

Robert Slavie is a sixty-year-old librarian, a life-long bachelor, overqualified for his job, with no place to go but home. Other than the possible achievement of his lifetime goal to read 50,000 books before retirement, Robert does not have a lot to look forward to. But one winter morning, a young woman bypasses his female colleague at the front desk and comes directly to him for assistance. When she immediately concocts a pet name for him and schedules another visit, he feels the silent footfall of doom. Is there any way he can survive the web of seduction he is being drawn into? From the mind of James LaFond bloom three night flowers of tainted love and deception:

Tirani and Oppresshaun 

This Design is Called Paisley 

Leila 

Will any of the fools caught up in the whispered webs woven by these wicked women be able to escape before they lose their minds, their bank accounts, or what remains of their withered souls?
Daughters of Moros

The Ghetto Grocer by James LaFond

The Ghetto Grocer is another in-demand Harm City title.

What food handling standards are observed in supermarkets? What does ‘clean’ mean to a supermarket manager? How might your fresh meat be mishandled? How does shoplifting impact the food retailer and you? What types of crimes occur in supermarkets? How exactly are your tax dollars spent by the starving oppressed who receive WIC vouchers, EBT cash, and food credit?

Paperback

Kindle

The Streets Have Eyes by James LaFond

The Streets Have Eyes is a Harm City book, examining characters in modern day Baltimore.

This is a book about characters, from the outrageously defiant and the interestingly adrift, to the disgusting and the morbidly debased. The Streets Have Eyes is a tale of postmodern urban anti-wonder.
Pick it up in paperback or Kindle format below:

Paperback

Kindle

Pondering on Weathertop

Impressions of J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Fellowship of the Ring," Revisited via the movie.

The reader should be familiar with the movies based on Tolkien's iconic trilogy; if he is not, having read the trilogy twice, this reader found no contradiction between the movies and the novels they were based upon. The movies are faithful enough to the text and seem to harbor less Hollywood poison than any other film adaptation, that when I feel moved to revisit the story, I choose the expedient of the movie. For this viewing, I sat with a companion who had never seen the movies, nor completed the trilogy, but had read "The Hobbit."

Her initial thought was to view them according to the story chronology with "The Hobbit" first. However, having viewed all three of the Hobbit movies, I informed her that unlike "The Lord of the Rings," the three-part screen adaptation of "The Hobbit" had progressively demonstrated the onset of the Hollywood cancer. Filmed at a video game pace, "The Hobbit" movies surrendered to the most virulent politically correct tropes; nordic negroes, a killer heroine flying through the air, slaying armies of armored giants, and a completely inserted subplot involving an interracial love affair between an elf princess who rejects her heritage and a doomed martyr dwarf. By the end of the last movie, I was so disgusted and had developed such a vicarious hatred for dwarves and elves that I embarrassed my son by cheering gutturally with a fist of power to every stroke delivered by the only masculine figures fighting for their heritage--the orc chieftains played by modern Maori stunt men. The message of Tolkien's "The Fellowship of the Ring," so keenly preserved in the movie, with Orcs representing the evils of industrialism and mass mongrelized society, was so twisted out of all shape by the same production group a mere ten years later that the only thing left representing a shred of Tolkien's metaphor was the depiction of the defiant Orc chieftain battling against all odds, against the greed of men and elves and dwarves, in a doomed fight to preserve his tribe.

I revisited The Fellowship of the Ring from a mythic, masculine perspective, the only passion I have left to me. I find myself identifying with the ring wraiths in this way. I identify the following themes:

1. The inevitable corruptibility of Men in Power,
2. The innocence and hope of children,
3. The damnation of the elite,
4. The industrialization of life,
5. The primacy of nature,
6. The alchemy of knowledge,
7. Intercession.

We'll come back to these as they appear in the story line.

First, we want to cover some plot elements. The persistent foibles of two of the hobbits, Merry and Pippin, seem to represent the stupidity and utility of common people who exist purely in the temporal sphere, who have no inkling of the transcendent. While the two lesser hobbits get the fellowship in plenty of trouble, demonstrating little or no forethought, their survivability reflected in their knack for navigating the violence of the physical world, is crucial to the quest. These commoner hobbits both facilitate Frodo's escape from the forces of evil as well as assuring that the evil forces are aware of the quest.

Frodo and Sam represent incorruptibility and honor, elements which rise up enough in the course of human affairs to frustrate the drive toward the dark side. They are, however, shown to be too trusting and direct, and certainly too few to be able to survive without the assistance of baser types of their kind, i.e., Merry and Pippin. Taken together, the four hobbits represent a synergy of honor, purity, criminality and recklessness necessary to frustrate any systemic effort to eradicate the human spirit. Each pair of hobbits make a whole as well as the two pairs together.

As a general note, Tolkien stands out as a philologist, a folklorist, and a mythologist. His story-telling skills when compared to commercial fiction writers, from contemporaries like Edgar Rice Burroughs down to writers of suspense, like Robert Ludlum and Eric von Lustbader [creator and inheriting author of the "Bourne" adventure series], are fairly pedestrian. Tolkien could never write a whodunit or a mystery novel. He relies on stupid mistakes as do authors of modern horror scripts and relies on improbable resurrections as do authors of religious texts. Tolkien's genius is in the texture of his world and the composition of its moral fabric.

The sacrifice of Gandalf in the ultimate cause results in the breaking of the fellowship that had been formed toward that same ultimate goal. In order for Tolkien's themes to be played out, the breaking of the fellowship was necessary in terms of the plot, so necessary, that it is indicated in the title, with the different characters, separating but still committed to the same goal, we have a story that evokes the Grail romances in "The Life of Arthur" by Mallory.

Theme One: The Inevitable Corruptibility of Men in Power

The central theme of the trilogy is clearly the ring, as indicated by the Title. The ring of power is a mythic artifact representing the corruption of power or the dictum that power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. This represents the gravity or the moral weight that affects all of the lesser thematic elements of the story.

Theme Two: The Innocence and Hope of Children

The characters, Frodo and Sam, represent innocence and hope respectively. As the element of innocence, Frodo supplies resistance to corruption. As the element of Hope, Sam represents the courage and commitment to honor necessary for the persistence of the purity embodied in Frodo. If this were a modern, more concise tale, Frodo and Sam would be the conflicting elements of one character.

Theme Three: The Damnation of the Elite

This is represented by the conference in Rivendell and embodied by the person of Boromir, the son of the steward of the great kingdom of Gondor. Boromir wears the trappings of the hero and when in combat, acts heroically, but he is in fact a representative of the intrinsically corrupt elite class and can barely keep his hands off of the ring for the entirety of the fellowship's quest. As a character, Boromir annoys the viewer every bit as much as the politician annoys the voter, for both the viewer and the voter are compelled to back the representative in his struggle, knowing full well that he will betray the cause. The lady, Galadriel, and Boromir's deep dread of her in the meeting, recall the politicians fleeting realization that he lacks the character of his ancestral counterpart, the hero.

Theme Four: The Industrialization of Life

Saruman, the wizard, Lord of Isengard, represents the industrialist and the modern nation state, his Orcs representing the soldier of machine warfare,--the warrior debased to a cipher—nameless and without identity. Saruman's campaign to industrialize his formerly sacred fiefdom was very strongly represented in the film, possibly inspired by Tolkien's experience in World War I.

Theme Five: The Primacy of Nature

This is best illustrated, in Tolkien's hands, by the unnatural ring wraiths, the nine dark riders that oppose the nine members of the fellowship. The wraiths, "were once kings of men," and so they appear the shadowed outline of what once might have been a hero king. These are the corrupt leaders of industrialized mankind. Interestingly, they appear unable to travel except by road, and the members of the fellowship fall into deepest peril at their hands when they gather in a town and when they seek the shelter of the ancient fortress turret now known as Weathertop, the most powerful and therefore most corrupt, and they only apply their power along the well-trodden axis of man's technological development. This is most tellingly illustrated when they attempt to cross a river with a diminished flow, only to be washed away by a torrent, called down by the elf princess.

Theme Six: The Alchemy of Knowledge

In The Lord of the Rings, there are only a handful of wizards. Foremost among these are Gandalf and Saruman. These two characters offer a dualistic study of light and dark sorcery, sorcery being the use of knowledge to affect the course of events, with the character of Saruman representing the corruption of humanity which occurs when knowledge is bent to serve power. Gandalf represents the sacrifice necessary to use knowledge as a means of thwarting the accrual of power in corrupt hands.

Theme Seven: Intercession

The character of Aragorn represents the reluctant hero who fears taking on the powers of kingship from the knowledge that kings, most clearly exemplified by his corruptible ancestor, are often corrupted by their assumption of power. Conversely, Aragorn represents the hope of common people for an intercessor, a supra-elite being who possesses enough power in his office that he is above the corrupting pursuit of power that typifies the twisted souls such as Borimor, and might check that corruptible pursuit. Consider again the scene at Weathertop, where Aragorn, the man who would reluctantly accept kingship, fights off all nine of the undead ring wraiths, who have through their pursuit of power degenerated from his heroic form to a state of empty predation. Aragorn represents to the ring wraiths what they once might have been and so they fear him, just as they represent what he might become, and so he drives them off like figments of a nightmare. This is the scene, midway through the first of the three novels comprising the trilogy, that predicts the third novel and names it, "The Return of the King."

Taken as a whole, "The Fellowship of the Ring" is a study of the hero in various forms, striving to survive a system contrived to make him an impossibility. In this sense, as long as there is a hero, there's hope.

A Well of Heroes

(c) 2017 James LaFond

Panhandler Nation by James LaFond

Panhandler Nation is a Harm City book.  James chronicles his interaction with the feral inhabitants of Baltimore on the street, in the buses, watering holes, workplaces and more.

Welcome to Panhandler Nation, otherwise known as the United States of America, the greatest debtor nation in history, ironically home to the most effective beggars imaginable.

Thank you Sir, your guilt is appreciated…
Panhandler Nation - Kindle, paperback.

The Greatest Boxer, ranking the top 144 boxers by James LaFond

The Greatest Boxer is James LaFond's definitive analysis of 144 boxers.

Who really was the Greatest? This one–of-a-kind survey is rounded out with sections on the history of boxing, the history and use of boxing equipment, the social impact of boxing, its morphology as a modern spectacle, including its relationship to MMA, as well as biographies of some of the earliest and most influential gloved boxers.
A must have for scholars of the sport and those with the masculine need to sort and rank the warriors they admire.

Amazon link (paperback):  The Greatest Boxer -- Amazon

James LaFond store (pdf version):  The Greatest Boxer -- JL store

In the Chinks in of The Machine, a collection of obscure biographies by James LaFond

In the Chinks of The Machine is a wide ranging collection of biographies of people who resisted the machine of civilization.

From drug dealers, dopers, slaves, soldiers, and everyday folks who are simply trying to see tomorrow, or wish to live or die with some sense of clarity, these are real people, historical and contemporary, who have adapted to life in the chinks of the soul eating machine we call civilization.
In the Chinks of The Machine

Take Me to Your Breeder: Letters from an Extraterrestrial Anthropologist by James LaFond

Take Me to Your Breeder, is an epistolary, emotionally dissociative survey of history, religion and a selection of the authors observations within his, ahem, diverse, social acquaintance.

Pick up a copy and leave a review:

Take Me to Your Breeder

Abandoning Libertarianism

James's main site is down, so to help you while away the time until the site can be repaired, I thought I'd post this response to James's recent post "Heritability of Values."

James, I will respond to your piece about libertarians, with the caveat that I have not watched the video and probably never will. As you have noticed, there is a substantial portion of the "alt-right" that are former libertarians. Since I am one myself, I can give you a little tongue in cheek summary of my "red-pill" experience.

1. I am super smart and highly educated. I believe in climate change and evolution. Proles and Christians are dumb!
2. I can drink whenever I want and use drugs occasionally and still hold down my office job.
3. Have you ever heard of Ayn Rand? She really knew what was up!
4. I learned in school that racism is really bad, and so are sexism, homophobia, transphobia, intersectional white supremacy zzzzzzz sorry, I fell asleep. But I am a really good student so I totally understand. The thing is, welfare is really harmful to minorities, and if we abolish the minimum wage, more people will hire peasants in domestic service positions.
5. The constitution is really great. The government can't take away my rights, it says so right there.

Conclusion: I am really awesome. I have never murdered anyone, and it is not even because it is against the law, it is because of my personal belief in non-violence! All my friends are exactly like me. Why do we even have laws? Why is pot illegal? Why can't I pay my Guatemalan groundskeeper $4/hour? It is more than he was making back home!

6. Wow, the science of genetics is really taking off, Imma go read some wikipedia pages brb.
7. Hmm, it seems quite likely that things like drug addiction and IQ have genetic components. Did you know Native Americans have gene variants that cause alcohol to literally make them crazy? Did you know that white children in the poorest socioeconomic level do better on SATs than black children in the highest level?
8. I think my school teachers and university professors have been lying to me about these things all my life. What else have they been lying about?

(an incomplete list)
a. Academic achievement between races
b. Physical and mental differences between men and women
c. Medical and nutritional advice (see sugar and junk food lobbies)
d. Climate change
e. Abortion, especially the market in dead babies
f. Impacts of diversity on communities
g. Birth control pills
h. Pesticide use and harms thereof
i. Monetary policy and fractional reserve lending
j. Islam is the religion of peace (Thanks GWB!)
k. The objective harm that comes with a gay lifestyle (drug addiction, domestic violence, child abuse, health problems of all kinds, not merely sexually transmitted, many others)

9. The constitution is a piece of paper and nobody cares what is written on it (thanks Chief Justice John Roberts). The US Government has nukes, what do you have?
10. Christians were right about a lot of things after all. I am just a speck in this giant universe, yet here I am. Maybe I am not really an atheist anymore either.

Conclusion: Everybody is not like me. Some people get into drugs and simply melt their brains, I guess they have a right to do that if they want, but it is not nice to see that happen to a loved one. Some people do not have the intellectual wherewithal to survive in the "information economy," maybe endless welfare is not a good idea, but neither is importing more of them in by the millions (why not give eugenics a try? I still don't trust the government). Some people are smart and hard working but they do not have the personality for college or an office job (hi James). Maybe it is not fair to drive down their wages by allowing corporate interests to determine immigration levels and legislate an environment that benefits owners and stockholders over labor. Labor unions can still go pound sand though, especially government labor unions.

I have said and done plenty of stupid things in my life, I am not embarrassed that I used to be a libertarian. Maybe if I were smarter I would have passed through that phase more quickly or skipped it completely. Politically, I don't really have a home, though I like the way things are going. This is just my silly story of how my political thinking changed. Many people could be exposed to the same information that I saw and not change their minds. Others could start out from a position similar to where I am now and go backwards, taking on a social justice mindset.

I think libertarianism is materialist because it stridently atheist.  These are people who are so very smart they have no need of primitive superstitions, and atheism always devolves into materialism.  Stefan Molyneux and Scott Adams did an interview together where they both agreed that even though they are atheists, they prefer the company of Christians over other atheists.  These guys are the prototypical examples of logic-addicted nerd libertarians who have come around to realizing that not everyone is like them, high IQ, hyperlogical, live and let live kind of people who will never commit a crime more serious than cannabis possession.

The question of cultural suicide is the more important one. I don't know what is causing it, I just hope we can get out of the tailspin.

(c) 2017 Lynn Lockhart

An Interview with the Author, About Reverent Chandler

 

Megan: How did you get the idea for these Viking-Indians in a future Ice Age?

 

James: This is a story against modernity, based on our belief that we are gods—for who else could heat a planet by holding a gaseous magnifying glass to the sun? That whole idea that Man is shaping climate more than the heavens and the sun came to me at the same time that this young white nationalist fellow complained to me that my psycho character in By This Axe! killed whites way out of proportion to people of color. Although I’m not a White Nationalist—but a race traitor really—I can see that the globalist one-world-government agenda is contingent upon the diminishment of the people of European descent to the point of being a curious remnant like the Australoids or Cappoids, the copper-skinned !Kung bushmen who owned most of Africa 40,000 years ago. This brought me to the realization that American whites are soon to be the beleaguered natives of this land just as the Amerindians once were.

My most recent research has also indicated to me that the Indian tribes who resisted against the French and English-speaking invaders the longest, from 1535 to1814—when the people of New England were terrified that Chief Joseph Brant and 300 warriors were going to invade the U.S.—that the most warlike tribes of the eastern woodlands were partially white, through adoption of escaped slave sailors and indentured servants and also through intermarrying with Norse explorers in medieval times. Where the ancient Iroquois were part Caucasian and adopted many Norse customs such as long houses and war axes, my future Vikings are part Indian and have adopted some of their traditions, namely hunting and totemic visions.

 

Megan: What are the characters like?

 

James: They are heroes, mass murderers on a mission to avenge their people after all of their women and children have been killed, except for Fend, who has trouble with killing, it bothers him, so he is like their medic.

 

Megan: is there a character based on you?

 

James: Yes, Fend. I’m no hero. By our standards I may be a fighter. But with a group of legitimate medieval bad-asses like Cull and Est, I’d be the water boy.

Megan: Okay, since you wrote it I’m pretty much afraid to read it, so, the first book… Reverent Chandler, what is the story line?

James: There are seven heroes—the last seven white guys on earth—trying to get Reverent Chandler back to his order’s sacred tree. Each warrior gets his own chapter where he stays behind to kill as many mud people as he can—and they all die gloriously!

Megan: Nice! It’ll be on the Halmark Channel next year, right?

 

Laughter

 

Megan: Okay, Reverent Chandler must be a nice guy, like the Chaplain on MASH. What’s his story?

James: He was being tortured by the papas, the catholic priests of the Muds. They cut his feet off to begin skinning him alive. The Nords that survived the battle to rescue him—the six bad asses and Fend, their Wuxx, which kind of means wolf pussy—have to get him back to the Home tree of the Nords where the sacred acts tattooed on his body will be preserved by skinning him alive and binding his intricately tattooed skin into a great wooden book.

Megan: And that’s a happy ending?

James: Yes, but it is not assured, besides their thousands of mud warriors the papas have “mudders” black guys that are trained like human blood hounds—the NBA with spears, Olympic quality cannibals raised on the flesh of white men!

Megan: You know, this is what they should do to child rapists, send them to some world that you made up—you fruit loop! I’ll take my copy sealed in glass so I can’t read it.

 

 

Reverent Chandler: The Saga of Fend

https://www.amazon.com/Reverent-Chandler-Saga-James-LaFond/dp/1519779925/ref=sr_1_57?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1468354470&sr=1-57&keywords=james+lafond

In the Virtual Lifeboat

Yesterday, 3/15/17, certain search engines began failing to find http://www.jameslafond.com.


Ron West was the forest to notice this.


Now, through some alchemy, the site I have used too build almost a hundred books is gone.


Perhaps it has been censored. I do not know.
I do hope I can get to the content, as numerous books are complete and exist in their most polished form on that site.


Thank you for your support, whoever made it here.


James
3/16/17

The Wishing Well: Gender and Race in Horror Movies

I take the horror genre overall as reaching its modern form with Bram Stoker's Dracula, just over a hundred years ago. The horror movies seen by the generation of my grandparents and parents held to this same form. The form places a small group of people in the path of some supernatural horror, which in many cases has a sympathetic element as the monstrous threat is often personalized to reflect a more primal human state. Looking at Dracula, he is, in a sense, a super masculine threat to a man and two women. This man and a small group of companions attempt to defend the women. They fail in saving the first woman but succeed in saving the second, although one of their number is killed. There is still an element of the heroic in this character's death, also in the battling against the monstrous, and the sense of heroism is even granted the monster who was battling the entire world.

This last element, the heroic monster, has gained increasing traction with the viewing public as society has increased in size and scale, magnifying the individual's sense of alienation. This got to the point in the early 1980s that monstrous horror became a type of fantasy literature, spawning fantasy movies in which the viewer identifies with protagonists who are themselves monsters, vampires and werewolves predominantly. This is essentially no longer horror but fantasy, as the viewer identifies with unthinkably powerful beings who literally feed on the greater part of humanity which is reduced to a herd.

So what has happened to the horrific element, and how has it been treated in films, particularly those directed at a youthful audience? In fantasy films, we get one element of the moral degradation of the hero by sketching them in the form of the monster which feeds on the people that the traditional hero was supposed to represent and defend. Heroes, as they were primally understood, no longer exist, having been replaced by super heroes. Though it's beyond the scope of this article, this writer believes that the super hero genre was conceived in order to eradicate the idea of the hero, of placing the hero in godlike and monstrous form, where previously heroism was within the reach of every man. In ancient epics, the hero rose from among men to challenge the petty gods and their monsters. Super heroes and super hero villains have very little in common with the ancient hero but with the petty gods with their narrow powers and their monstrous pets.

This leaves us with the modern horror story of the slasher variety, which is entirely bereft of the supernatural and of the heroic, and is reduced to a sadistic hunt. Let us examine the standard tropes in this end time genre:

1. The protagonists are urban/suburban youths.

2. The setting is rural.

3. The killers or the monster are exclusively male.

4. They are always Caucasian men.

5. The protagonists continually act against their own self-interest and survival, which empowers the viewer. The endearing aspect of this genre is that viewers will yell warnings at the stupidly acting protagonist who is about to meet a grim fate.

6. Victims who die early, representing the iniquitous price paid for the bad course charted by the group, traditionally come in three varieties: slut, jock and a person of color.

7. Masculine resistance, initiative and intervention by or on behalf of the victims always clearly fails. A classic example of this, combining tropes 6 and 7, is from the movie, "The Shining," in which the black clairvoyant adult played by Scatman Crothers who is coming to save the boy clairvoyant from the evil white father is immediately butchered upon entering the hotel. Black characters in general are cast as victims, are in the minority, and are killed in a way reflecting the hopeless condition of their kind in general. This has recently changed and will be discussed toward the end of this essay.

8. The primary target of the monster is a virtuous white woman [sometimes a precociously moral child], who, crucially is not believed by her husband or male love interest when she realizes she is being hunted.

9. The survivor of such a story is either a child or a young woman who did not have sex during the course of the story.

10. Any hero-type actions that are successful will be committed by this escaping, non-masculine victim of innocence.

The changing point for the status of the lone black victim in these predominantly Caucasian herds of victims was in the unique, heroic horror movie, Deep Blue. In this late 1990s movie, an evil female scientist uses a heroic white man as a tool in her breeding of super sharks. When the sharks predictably turn on their makers, the heroics of the man work, and the evil woman is killed by her monster. There is also an endearing scene when the cook in the experimental aquarium, a black character played by L.L. Cool J is wading through his flooded kitchen and just as the reader expects him to be devoured by a shark, he says to himself something to the effect that he was in a bad spot, because in a movie, this is where the black guy always gets killed. At this point the story diverts from the standard horror narrative and could be classified as a type of heroic science fiction. Another notable example of this type of heroic science fiction with many heroic masculine elements, made in the same period in the early 2000s is Pitch Black, which become the starting point for a cycle about a primally masculine hero struggling against an evil system.

The movies just discussed above with the science fiction angle and a heroic element might be seen as reactionary films, just as the slasher genre typified by the Halloween and Friday the Thirteenth series had become impotent to the point where the audiences were cheering on the villain. Since that time, there has been a serious effort to remake some of these films based on more realistic understanding of psychopathic killers with more sympathetic victims and more well-rounded monstrous white men. To bring us up to date, I'd like to discuss two movies that I recently watched, which are targeted to a youthful audience in such a way as to maximize appeal among white female and black viewers.

"Hush" is a film about a deaf woman who writes novels alone in a prodigiously windowed cottage in the middle of the woods. She is estranged from the big city and her black ex-boyfriend, a distant hunk who remains improbably supportive of her writing career. She and her neighbors, a traditional couple, attractive woman and very masculine, handsome white man, come under attack by a white male psychopath. This pretty much tells you all you need to know about the movie. The he-man, next door neighbor, will be butchered by the geek with the knife, who is hunting the women, and the primary female victim becomes a gritty heroine slaying her hunter, with the underlying moral of the story being that she should not have left her black boyfriend in the city. The movie ends with police cars coming out of the city to save her: rural bad, city good; white man bad, black man good.

The next movie, "The Watcher," features the only type of married couple that Hollywood wants to promote these days, a white woman and a black man, who move into a house that appears to be haunted. The previous owners of the house were an elderly Asian couple, victimized by the ghost. The real estate agent who heartlessly sold the haunted house is a white woman. The creepy neighbors consist of a nosy white woman and her retarded teenage son. The good neighbors are black: a well-heeled strong woman with a husband who is a Hollywood stunt man. The entire police department consists of females and black men. There is not an adult Caucasian male in the movie. Unlike the ineffectual Caucasian man of the traditional slasher flick, the black men believe the woman is under threat and are able to defeat the evil that threatens the white wife. Up until the final scene, they think that this evil is the nosy white woman next door. But in the final scene, just after they adopt the poor retarded son of the nosy white woman, it is revealed that he is the psychopathic killer and terrorizer of women--suddenly shedding his boyish handicap and turning into a towering monster of a man. The moral of the story is that white people are either crazy or evil. That's it.

To review the horror genre, with few exceptions, horror from the age of silent film in the 1920s and up through the early 1960s was infused with heroic elements, generally placing a virtuous woman in danger. Danger she cannot defeat on her own.

Ignoring the branching fantasy genre typified by romanticizing the monster, essentially founded by Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice, and the branching into Science-Fiction horror tales, beginning with Aliens [featuring a strong female protagonist, but also masculine heroism], remaining horror has tended to the gross slasher flicks discussed above and of more mature supernatural horror stories which follow the satanic threat complex, which eradicates heroism without targeting rural white men as the ultimate evil.

Overall, since the cultural revolution of the 1960s, horror films in general have stridently attacked the notion of heroic action as impossible and even childish.

Secondarily, since the 1960s, villains in non-supernatural horror have all been rural white men. Even the location of many supernatural horror tales ends up being rural.

The tertiary message of horror films, that the man will not support the woman in times of crisis, seems to be the solid third runner, until very recently, with the reintroduction of heroics in the form of the female victim and her black man, who is properly submissive to the fears of his white wife, rather than dismissive. The addition of these last themes strike one as overly contrived and may ultimately occupy a passing fad or niche in the genre. Will these themes of black masculine virtue expand, resurrecting the dead hero in limited guise?

What is of most interest to this reader is the obliteration of the idea of the hero, especially when taken together with the civic neo-paganism of the wildly popular superhero genre.

But returning to the horror genre itself, of that narrow classification of film that focuses solely on the horrific actions of men, heroism might be viewed as a necessary casualty in the process of scaring the viewer in his/her seat. For the introduction of a single competent man with a handgun would shatter the fragile story line, built as it is on bad decisions.

What then, is the main thrust of slasher-variety horror fiction?

It is quite obviously the same theme that one sees in such iconic films as "Deliverance," "Forest Gump," "The Green Mile," in the Denzel Washington films, "Man on Fire," "Safe House," and "The Equalizer," in the little known 70s film, "Southern Comfort," in the classic and remake versions of "The Hills Have Eyes," "Texas Chainsaw Massacre," and "Halloween" movies and in the entire crop of recent Rob Zombie films such as "The Devil's Rejects," and even in the quirky "Secret Window," that white men are evil, an incredibly lethal strain of humanity. However, taking the broad overview, it is obvious that the most evil white man is the rural one, who owns a gun and lives in hills or words. Failing that he’s an Eastern European white man.

[Since the late 1980s, action films have featured Eastern European bad guys in profusion. In a recent viewing of an FBI action TV show called "Numbers," in five episodes there was not a single person of color or female among the swarming army of white male villains, though black heroes did fight alongside conflicted white agents against them. Police dramas are not generally set in rural locales, but feature an overwhelming preponderance of white male criminals, in the very urban settings that are in fact dominated by criminals of color.]

The connection between evil, the white man and the rural setting is so strong in the horror genre, that its premier author Stephen King [advertisements for King’s books and stories about his work dominate and literally keep afloat no less than two horror magazines] has penned two novels about a white male writer seeking solitude in the remote countryside, with this isolation from the city turning him into a vehicle for evil, in both cases attacking his own family.

Upon consideration of the cinematic weight—even in comedy with films such as "City Slickers"—that equates rural white men with evil, and realizing that all of the filmmakers and actors involved are suburban or urban persons, we see a vast prejudice. For everyone in America knows that all of the most violent and deadly environments are cities and their sprawling suburbs, in which the vast majority of violence is committed by people of color. Yet films across a variety of genres depict urban environments as safe havens, people of color as so virtuous and non-violent as to render these characters non-interesting, and depict rural white men as prodigious killers, with the rural enclaves, that in actual fact see almost no murder, appearing in movies as virtual slaughter zones for trophy killing.

Could it be, that somewhere deep in the elite, urban American soul, that there remains a cultural memory that when the white slaves brought to this country in chains to work plantations [1] that are now paved over by urban centers, that they escaped the slave matrix through either flight, hard work or insurrection and fled, gun in hand, to those very hills and forests that modern filmmakers have peopled with monsters for over a half century? Is the modern slasher flick nothing more than a retelling of the tale the slave master of old told his white and black slaves, that to leave the plantation was to cast off the fetters of security for the perils of the savage wilderness, peopled by predatory outcasts?

Notes

1. A plantation planted people to form a taxation and labor base for claiming possession in the name of the home country.

(c) 2017 James LaFond

The Jericho Bone by James LaFond

The Jericho Bone is the second edition of the historical horror novel, An Arabian Terror Tale. covering the events of the Egyptian famine of 1201.

Pick it up in paperback or Kindle edition: The Jericho Bone

An Arabian Terror Tale: Fruit of The Deceiver Omnibus Edition by James LaFond

An Arabian Tale combines parts one and two of Fruit of the Deceiver with added content.  An Arabian Terror Tale is a historical horror novel, based on the events of the Egyptian famine of 1201.

In the year 1201, in the midst of the worst famine in recorded history, the adults of Egypt waged a war of extermination upon its children. Nearly every child of one of the wealthiest and militarily secure nations on earth, was hunted, captured, killed, and then eaten, by strangers, parents, and grandparents. Though the poor had nothing else to eat but their young and their dead, the wealthy engaged in child-eating—as well as the gourmet preparation of overweight people—as a culinary art. The travelling doctor, Abd al-Latif, left a detailed, yet reluctant, account of this year of grisly feasting. This is his story. This omnibus edition includes the novella Fruit of The Deceiver, the novel Forty Hands of Night, the never before published vignette Seeds of The Deceiver, and the short The Journal of Abd al-Latif.

An Arabian Terror Tale

Parts one and two were previously described here and here, as well as the earlier combined volume here.

Black & Pale: Fruit of The Deceiver Omnibus Edition by James LaFond

Black & Pale is the collection of Fruit of the Deceiver and Forty Hands of Night in a single volume.

In the year 1201, in the midst of the worst famine in recorded history, the adults of Egypt waged a war of extermination upon its children. Nearly every child of one of the wealthiest and militarily secure nations on earth, was hunted, captured, killed, and then eaten, by strangers, parents, and grandparents. Though the poor had nothing else to eat but their young and their dead, the wealthy engaged in child-eating—as well as the gourmet preparation of overweight people—as a culinary art. The travelling doctor, Abd al-Latif, left a detailed, yet reluctant, account of this year of grisly feasting. This is his story. This omnibus edition includes the novella Fruit of The Deceiver, the novel Forty Hands of Night, the never before published vignette Seeds of The Deceiver, and the short The Song of Jeannot.

See the previous posts for each book:

Fruit of the Deceiver

Forty Hands of Night

Use the Amazon link to below to purchase a copy.

Black & Pale

Purchase a pdf from the James LaFond site store:

pdf version

Forty Hands of Night by James LaFond

Forty Hands of Night continues the historical horror novel, Fruit of the Deceiver, based on the Egyptian famine of 1201.

In the year 1201, in the midst of the worst famine in recorded history, the adults of Egypt waged a war of extermination upon its children. Nearly every child of one of the wealthiest and militarily most secure nations on earth, was hunted, captured, killed, and then eaten, by strangers, parents, and grandparents. Though the poor had nothing else to eat but their young and their dead, the wealthy engaged in child-eating—as well as the gourmet preparation of overweight people—as a culinary art. The travelling doctor, Abd al-Latif, left a detailed, yet reluctant, account of this year of grisly feasting. Forty Hands of Night is the conclusion of his story.

Follow the Amazon link to pick up your copy.

Forty Hands of Night

See the earlier post for part 1:

Fruit of the Deceiver

Forty Hands of Night is also included in The Jericho Bone.

Fruit of the Deceiver by James LaFond

Fruit of the Deceiver is a historical horror novel set during the Egyptian famine of 1201.

From October 1200 until August 1201, the worst famine in Egyptian history starved the nation beyond the bounds of humanity. For months the children of this ancient land were devoured by adults. When children became scarce, rich and poor alike turned their knives on the elderly, the fat, and the slow. One man, the travelling physician Abd al-Latif, was practicing medicine at the epicenter of this cannibal holocaust and left us an account of one of mankind’s darkest times. Fruit of The Deceiver is his story.

Read the outstanding reader review by "The Leveller" and pick up a copy using the Amazon link:

Fruit of the Deceiver

Fruit of the Deceiver is also available as part of The Jericho Bone.

Rise by James LaFond

In Rise, published in 2014, LaFond gives us three tales of twerp's revenge, including, Soter's Way, Buzz Bunny, and Menthol Rampage.  Use the link below to order Rise and leave a review!

Soter’s Way: Archie Jones is a handicapped janitor who lives in a mansion with five roommates, some of whom are being harassed by a pair of muggers. But there is the Man in the Attic, who has never left his room. Could he possibly help Archie and his friends?

Buzz Bunny: Tamar has always been bullied. But the notorious Simpson Boys mean to kill him after school in the wooded depths of Stoner Park. Fortunately for Tamar he happens upon a ‘mad-planning’ rabbit of the telepathic kind who offers to aid him in his quest to be free of bullies. The rabbit has a price though, and that price will forever alter Tamar’s relationship with the unfathomable world of adults. 

Menthol Rampage: JayJay Brooks has his health, a good carpentry job, and a beautiful girlfriend. Then something happens that takes all of that away. This leaves JayJay with only one philosophical question to ponder: and the answers are all hanging from his tool belt.

Rise: Three Twerps Take on the World

Rise is also part of the anthology, Darkly.  

The Four Masculine States

Discussing Nassim Taleb’s Work on Human Domestication with Lynn Lockhart

James,

I have been thinking about the Russian hooligan video and also reading Antifragile, by Nassim Taleb and trying to connect some ideas. Without getting into the details of the book, the topic of risk taking is important, and I am not sure you have addressed it in terms of civilization, combat arts, or masculinity. The spectrum of risk taking goes from the pathologically timid, he who fears losing his possessions or injuring his body, across to the reckless, who can't judge the risk or doesn't care. There is also the aspect of gambling, what I would consider as playing games of pure chance, like slot machines or lottery tickets. These are risks with no real investment. I have linked a piece on domestication, or employment as slavery and would love to hear your thoughts.

How to legally own another person, Nassim Taleb

I will include some choice quotes to entice you to read it:

Someone who has been employed for a while is giving you the evidence of submission
...
Evidence of submission is displayed by having gone through years of the ritual of depriving himself of his personal freedom for nine hours every day, punctual arrival at an office, denying himself his own schedule, and not having beaten up anyone. You have an obedient, housebroken dog.
...
The best slave is someone you overpay and who know it, terrified of losing his status.
...
Risk takers can be socially unpredictable people. Freedom is always associated with risk taking, whether it led to it or came from it. You take risks, you feel part of history. And risk takers take risks because it is in their nature to be wild animals.
...
So while cursing and bad language can be a sign of dog-like status and total ignorance –the “canaille” which etymologically relates these people to dogs; ironically the highest status, that of free-man, is usually indicated by voluntarily adopting the mores of the lowest class.
...
Watching Putin against others made me realize that domesticated (and sterilized) animals don’t stand a chance against a wild predator. Not a single one. Fughedabout military capabilities: it is the trigger that counts.

James writes:

This article, Lynn, was extensive and excellent. It is, however, written from an emasculated and materialistic perspective, the two states being very much conjoined in Western Modernity’s witch’s brew of unmanning norms. Taleb does not differentiate between genders, admitting that, in the white collar corporate environment he speaks of, these domesticated and “wild” behaviors cross over the gender line and they do. He probably sees the corporate environment as intrinsically male, according to our false modernist convention, which I do not. Perhaps this is illuminated in his book. Corporate environments are “neuter spaces” defeminizing women and unmanning men.

The imitation of the lower class by the upper is as old as Rome, probably older and signals a society in decline. Societies in decline have always—as far as I have been able to determine—suffered in the masculine sphere. This is simple to track with monarchies as succeeding generations of kings and emperors becoming increasingly effeminate, with a reactionary phase of ultra-masculine revival often signaling a last gasp of the culture.

I will focus on this item and the discussion on swearing in the work place as a wild expression of rebellion and reversal to a wild animal state rather than a domesticated state.

Cursing as Wild Devolutionary Rebellion

Taleb deals with two states, wild and domesticated, just as violence analysts traditionally dealt with two states of aggression response, Fight or Flight. These are both over simplified. Aggression response includes Fight, Flight, Posturing and Submission.

Let us apply these four aspects of aggression to the corporate work place, which is a system of aggression against the individual. Fighting gets you fired, flight gets you to the same place, posturing is demonstrated by misbehaving in the work place as Taleb describes and submission keeps you employed and or employable.

In terms of emasculation, cursing is a symptom, not a cure. Who traditionally curses the most?:

First, sailors, who are the least free and most enslaved military men on the bottom rung, with most sailors of the period in which their swearing was made famous being kidnapping victims or convicts.

The second most famous group of swear mouths is convicts, another frustrated, powerless lot.

The third most foul-mouthed group is black Americans, traditionally at the bottom of American society, bypassed by other ethnicities that have come in beneath them and displaying intergenerational embitterment toward the greater society.

As a person working at the bottom of the economy for 30-plus years, I can tell you that women swear more in the workplace than men of the same class. This makes all the sense in the world when one realizes that the famously foul-mouthed black man is raised, not by a man, but by a woman, who typically displays immense levels of cursing, far beyond any sailor of yore. This behavior is common among women who are forced by circumstance—and this circumstance might be caused by her decision to take government money in exchange for not living with the father of her children—to take on a male role. I can tell you from coaching experience that mothers of athletes are louder and more foul than fathers. Cursing is the classic form of powerless, impotent, rebellion, blaspheming the social norms that one is unable to overcome or succeed within.

Cursing in the work place is not a sign of wildness but of a feral state, with hallmarks of feminine verbosity rooted in the functional chatter of a gathering social animal who must be keyed to raise the alarm and “chimp out” so that the men might come to their aid.

This point will be better understood if we progress to the four masculine states.

The Four Masculine States

Wild:
Typified by neglected children and male children raised by animals, or by a castoff feral human bereft of tribal affiliation, some homeless men fit this rare “Tarzanesque” example, in fiction and myth often represented by the monstrous being, existing at the level of the animals below that of primitive man.

Primal:
Disciplined adaptation in the form of learned behavior necessary to prevail over more powerful wild creatures and survive the awesome powers of nature, which, among all Stone Age hunting peoples studied to date, is typified by high functioning silence in the hunting of enemy men and animals and by ritualized noise [music] most often practiced in the presence of women, whereby women gain the impression of men as noisy and hence imitate men’s more verbose at home ritual rather than their functional field behavior.

Domesticated:
Civilized, feminized to varying and usually progressive degrees, until the crucial modern phase when the female too begins to suffer neutering effects.

Feral:
Criminal, corrupted, often ultra-masculine in a narrow sense and unbalanced behaviors, typified by a mix of wild, primal and domesticated traits.

Using Taleb’s example of Putin and your question of the Russian Soccer Hooligans who made such work of normal soccer hooligans, we must understand that the normal human is the domesticated one, the soccer hooligan is feral and the Russian Soccer hooligan is self made and society formed, representing the resurrected Primal practice of training as a unit. Understanding Taleb’s wolf example to be on the mark, one must admit that wolves have a primal culture, a society designed around hunting. This is why they worked well with men and have been venerated in primal cults since the beginning. A battle between drunken British soccer hooligans and trained Russian soccer hooligans is like a battle between a pack of feral dogs and a wolf pack—a rout.

Yes, compared to a Western politician Putin is as a wolf to a lap dog.

Let’s put Putin on a human scale of wildness and domestication.

Homeless, retarded man =Wild dog
Putin = Wolf
Politician = lap dog
Criminal = feral dog

If we have a single elimination tournament which canine wins?

The lap dog is eaten by the feral dog.

The wolf, being shaped into a paragon of wild canine virtues by the pack system [the canine tribe] gets the best of his undisciplined wilder foe.

The wolf and the feral dog is another wipeout as the feral dog is an imitator, a creature beginning an evolution back to wolf kind, pitted against a fully evolved canine predator.

This little worksheet shows Putin’s Russia for what it is, a conscious attempt to rebuild manhood and masculine culture.

Looking at American society via this model we expand the canine metaphor from lap dog politician to law officer as sheep dog guarding the flock, the prize-fighter as pit bull, soldiers as German shepherds, Doberman pincers, Irish wolfhounds and other big breeds used in military action in the past and today, with most Americans typing as some kind of house dog.

Lynn, there is a reason why ancient warriors around the world venerated the wolf, why Robert E. Howard constantly used the wolf as the totemic spirit of the tribal man, why the Wolves of Vinland, founded by neo-masculinity advocates in America have taken the wolf as their symbol. To be accurate, we must admit that the wolf pack is a canine tribal structure with values and shared goals and have evolved far beyond the grizzly bear, another canine that gets along on its own due to immense powers, or the skulking jackal, who remains forever marginalized, the animal that Howard used as the totemic image of the cowardly criminal and that in our time is used to describe CIA hit men.

Lynn writes:
James, I like how far you took the dog/wolf analysis. Canines are like our shadows along the path from Wild and Primal to Domesticated and back around to Feral.

I have also observed that women in the workplace curse more than men, though the foulest mouthed person I knew in my short career in finance was a scouser (native of Liverpool) and probably wished he had been a football hooligan in his early days.

Taleb is fun to read. He knows a lot of history and has made some highly original observations. Perhaps we can come back to some of his other writings.

(c) 2017 James LaFond & Lynn Lockhart

An example of James' handiwork

Planet Buzzkill by James LaFond

Published in 2014, Planet Buzzkill is the story of an alien invasion as experienced by a bus-full of Baltimore denizens.

Have you grown tired of alien invasion and zombie apocalypse fiction where mankind is represented by secret agents, astronauts, hero cops, military men, do-gooders and psychopaths? Have you ever thought to yourself, ‘If it really happened, how would me and these knuckleheads around me make out?’ Wonder no more! In 2012 urban violence guru, Harm City author, and self-proclaimed extra-terrestrial anthropologist, James LaFond, boarded a Baltimore City bus, looked around at the dozen strangers on the bus, assigned them names, observed them over the next month, and then put them center stage in First Contact: A Working Class Guide To Mankind’s Final Hours. Read if you dare, as a busload of ordinary Baltimoreans are selected by cruel Fate to make mankind’s last stand against a vast intergalactic intelligence.
Use the link below to buy a copy and leave a review!

Planet Buzzkill

Planet Buzzkill can also be found in the anthology, Road Killing.

Astride the Chariot of Night by James LaFond

Astride the Chariot of Night: God of War & By This Axe! is a stand-alone volume of the Sunset Saga, a time-traveling, sci-fi and fantasy adventure.

How would it feel to be a god among men, to be the personification of war itself? What would such a being think upon a return to the world of men, a world that had forgotten his very name, a world like 21st Century America? This dystopic adventure blends military science-fiction and mythic fantasy, as Yule, First Warrior of the Eternal Hall, and God of War over Men, is cast down from Heaven to wander 21st Century America in a brutal quest for a much coveted head that remains maddeningly attached to the body of a meddlesome prophet.

Use the Amazon link below to add it to your library, and read reader reviews!


Astride the Chariot of Night

The World is Our Widow by James LaFond

The World is Our Widow:  The Sunset Saga Book 3: Cities of Dust, Part 1 is a time travelling science fiction story, and part of the Sunset Saga series.

Victorian scholar and adventurer Richard F. Burton is sought by an unlikely team of time hunters. It is 1868 and Captain Richard F. Burton, intrepid secret agent, undefeated swordsman, fierce intellectual and famed explorer wastes away as the British Counsel to Sao Paulo, Brazil, unlikely to advance in the service of the Queen due to the powerful enemies made by his outspoken opinions on colonial misrule...

Removing a man of Burton’s stature from the historical time-line before his natural death could cause a deadly ripple in Time. Fortunately Burton is known to have disappeared into the wilds of South America from September 1868 until March 1869 with two mysterious adventurers, and uncharacteristically left no written account. Professor Stevenson is journeying 145 years into the past with militant white supremacist Randy Bracken as his ‘security operative’, intent on their being those two men. Can a mathematics professor and a fixer for the Aryan Brotherhood convince the stubborn Burton to forsake Queen and Country for a ride through Time, even as they themselves are stalked by hunters from their future?
Click the links below for PDF, print and kindle editions.

The World is Our Widow - Print

The World is Our Widow -- Kindle

The World is Our Widow - PDF