A to Z: H is for Home

Home where my thought's escaping. Where my love lies waiting silently for me. These are the emotional longings that sustain Al Lyons, the main character of SAVIOR, as he lies underground in the secret prison of the Santos Muertos, not knowing where he is, whether he'll ever see daylight or his son or his home in Plymouth Beach, Florida again. He hallucinates apocalyptic visions and contemplates the release of breathing in the water while being water-boarded, but memories of home, and his son Ricky keep him from taking the easy route. Not that home is ever wholly there to get back to. His wife Mary is dead, and Ricky is on the verge of adulthood, ready to move on to the next phase of his life, finding a home, a place for himself.

(photo by Russell Lee)

The idea of home sustains us in the worst of times, but also every day. Getting home from work for me in the evenings is like shedding the false consciousness of the workplace and becoming again the person I can choose to be. It must be that way for most people, although there are the lucky few for whom the work world is a release into the desired persona. For me, getting home is that desired release. So to write about a man who longs to escape the torture chamber and get home again is a natural thought process to conceive of. Don't get me wrong, I do love my job, and appreciate the ability to get up every day and do it again, but home, that's where my thought's are escaping and my love lies waiting. And there's nothing wrong with that. Not in my book.

SAVIOR will be published April 18th on the Amazon Kindle platform by Harvard Square Editions. Visit the SAVIOR page on the HSE website, and then check back here throughout the A to Z challenge month to learn more about SAVIOR and publication launch details.

A to Z: G for Guatemala

Guatemala is one of the prettiest places I've ever been. It's a lush green mountainous country with a tortured past. The beauty of the mountains hides a lot of suffering. The Pacific coast has a lot of untouched fishing villages that not a lot of tourists get to. This is where Ricky and Al enjoy their holiday and where they come across the Chocomal. The Chocomal is a Mayan artifact, a stone tablet with hieroglyphic inscriptions that mean little to Ricky aside from reminding him of his mother. But the Chocomal has long been sought by experts in Mayan mathematics and archaeology for what it is rumored to depict, the ratios, present at the inception of the Universe, that are responsible for the formation of matter. Ricky's mother Mary loved all things Mayan. Al, Ricky's father, loves the mountains and the natural beauty and wants to see his relationship with his son get on a better footing. But the Santos Muertos have other ideas. They are using Guatemala as a base to launch an attack on the US mainland, according to the CIA man Ricky and Al befriend unwittingly at their beachside hotel.

When I was there there was a curfew in the capital, Guatemala City and guerrillas in the mountains of the Western Highlands. The US embassy claimed the countryside was pacified, but that was not the reality I saw. I always thought it made a good setting for a novel. SAVIOR begins in Guatemala and ends in Canada. It's a great American story.

SAVIOR will be published April 18th on the Amazon Kindle platform by Harvard Square Editions. Visit the SAVIOR page on the HSE website, and then check back here throughout the A to Z challenge month to learn more about SAVIOR and publication launch details.

A to Z: F is for Friendship

Friends make life sweet, and in SAVIOR, both Al Lyons and Ricky his son find that friends not only lighten the load on their paths to freedom and maturity, but also teach them some of the deepest lessons of what it means to be alive.

Ricky escapes the clutches of the US military, and with his girlfriend Lianne he hits the road to find his father. Both of them have some growing up to do, but they watch each other's back until it is no longer possible.

Al finds solace with his fellow prisoners in the underground Santos Muertos compound. Together they plot escape and help keep hope alive. One prisoner in particular becomes Al's confidante and romantic partner, proving that the bonds of friendship can blossom into something greater in the worst of circumstances.

To quote the narrator of a book I wrote called LATITUDES - A Story of Coming Home, speaking of friends, he says "They were all coming from different places and on their way to different destinations. They served as precious holds for each other in the shifting sands."

"Greater love has no-one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends." John 15:13.

SAVIOR will be published April 18th on the Amazon Kindle platform by Harvard Square Editions. Visit the SAVIOR page on the HSE website, and then check back here throughout the A to Z challenge month to learn more about SAVIOR and publication launch details.

A to Z: E for Environment

Environmental problems plague the world of SAVIOR. In Guatemala heavy rains cause flooding and destruction along the Caribbean coast during the time Ricky and Al visit. The mountain guide, Evelio, complains to Al that the trade winds have stopped blowing, the frogs are disappearing and the trees of the cordillera are dying. In SAVIOR, not only is the rule of law breaking down across the globe, but the fabric of life seems to be unraveling. This is the wasteland.

One of these days we will wake up and it will be ours. In a world of rapid change and environmental destruction, there are species who flourish: cockroaches, rats, coyotes. And in SAVIOR, the LSM, the Santos Muertos, a death cult that welcomes the apocalypse because it heralds the beginning of a new age, their age, the age of Lady Death, are also spreading their tentacles.

SAVIOR will be published April 18th on the Amazon Kindle platform by Harvard Square Editions. Visit the SAVIOR page on the HSE website, and then check back here throughout the A to Z challenge month to learn more about SAVIOR and publication launch details.

(Photo courtesy of US National Archives and Records Administration)

A to Z: D for Doomsday machine

Doomsday machines are devices designed to bring about planetary level catastrophe. Their use in real life has obviously been limited, but they have been proposed as a real component of deterrent strategies to avoid nuclear Armageddon during the Cold War. The absurd proposition of Mutually Assured Destruction would be guaranteed with such a device, say a computer linked to a stockpile of hydrogen bombs designed to detonate and spread nuclear fallout around the world, and geared to go off independent of human interference.

The madness of the doomsday machine is linked to the mad search for world domination by one bloc or another in the recent past. In SAVIOR, the doomsday machine is being built by the LSM gang in their secret facility beneath the Alberta oil tar sands. Los Santos Muertos plan to hold world governments hostage and establish a new world order based on their worship of Mixtecacihuatl, an ancient Meso-American goddess.

The LSM doomsday machine will use the mathematical ratios discovered by ancient Mayan astronomers that lie at the heart of creation. By emitting sound waves pitched using these ratios, the LSM Resonator will set off tectonic shifts and volcanic eruptions that will bring about an unprecedented disaster which will plunge the world into darkness.

This was the original cover for Savior, using an image that evokes the idea of a doomsday machine.

SAVIOR will be published April 18th on the Amazon Kindle platform by Harvard Square Editions. Visit the SAVIOR page on the HSE website, and then check back here throughout the A to Z challenge month to learn more about SAVIOR and publication launch details.

A to Z: Cult of Santa Muerte

Cult of Santa Muerte: Lady Sebastian, Lady of the Shadows, Lady of the Night, Lady of the Seven Powers.These are some of the names attributed to a female folk saint from northern Mexico on which are based some of the ideological underpinnings of the gang in SAVIOR, Los Santos Muertos or LSM. 

The LSM have managed to infiltrate most governments in the Western Hemisphere through the influence of their vast riches, but they want more, they actually desire a breakdown of western civilization in order to further the power and aims of their cult. Some of their practices include cannibalism, sadism, ritual drug use and ritual sacrifice. and their leader, Samael Chagnon, desires to impose a new historical age in which the cult of Lady Death forms a central piece.

Actual Santa Muerte practitioners may have none of these conceptions. Instead we know their beliefs are an outgrowth of indigenous pre-Columbian reverence for death as a part of life. Symbols of death and similar folk beliefs can be seen in the Mexican traditions of the Day of the Dead. But the Santa Muerte cult takes these a step further. Followers of Santa Muerte build altars to the figure of Lady Death and ask her for favors in return for their ritual worship. US officials have warned that drug cartel members have recently taken up the Santa Muerte cult in significant numbers, and there is a feeling that the cult may promote greater criminality and levels of violence among warring cartels. It is believed that Santa Muerte followers number in the several million in the US, Mexico and Central America.

SAVIOR will be published April 18th on the Amazon Kindle platform by Harvard Square Editions. Visit the SAVIOR page on the HSE website, and then check back here throughout the A to Z challenge month to learn more about SAVIOR and publication launch details.

A to Z: B for Boyhood

Boyhood is a time of innocence, a reverie, the short-lived golden age of youth that we look back on with the fondness of nostalgia. We try hard to remember, and our memories are tinged with self-serving aggrandizement -- all the games we played, the tears we cried, all the lessons learned, the mistakes made, the loves won and lost. Boyhood leads slowly into manhood, and many men wistfully call themselves "old boys" and hope to retain the luster of youth long past the days when the grass was really greener. Hope springs eternal, and at this time of year it's difficult not to feel a bounce and catch a whiff of the heedlessness and carefree days of the past, that foreign country where they speak a different language and do things differently, to paraphrase.

In SAVIOR, Ricky Lyons, Al's son, is that paragon of boyhood, an athlete and a scholar. His father has hopes for his perfection which are just dreams of extending his own glory and reconquering the ecstatic joys of those never-to-return days.

Ricky has struggled with developing his own personhood and ambitions, a conflict that has led him to the depths of suicidal ideation and self-hate. But in Guatemala, he finds an inner peace while the two, father and son, wrestle with the big waves of the Pacific in the surfing town of Monterico. Now he sees he is stronger than his father, but curiously, he needs him more than ever, and when Al is taken prisoner by the Santos Muertos, Ricky dedicates himself to finding and saving his father, a quest that will lead him through the underbelly of the Americas to the Santos Muertos compound deep beneath the Canadian oil tar belt. This is a coming of age journey like no other, and in the end we will know, as will Ricky, the true meaning of heroism and sacrifice.

SAVIOR will be published April 18th on the Amazon Kindle platform by Harvard Square Editions. Visit the SAVIOR page on the HSE website, and then check back here throughout the A to Z challenge month to learn more about SAVIOR and publication launch details.