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Fascinated With Ghost Towns
Three Days in Hell follows a morally compromised Bible salesman sent to a dying town where corruption, violence, and temptation turn a punishment assignment into a fight for survival. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The original inspiration came from church. In Christian belief, when he died, Jesus went to hell for three days, being resurrected on the third day. The first genesis of the story was trying to have a Jesus like figure and what that experience was like. But the more Bobby Santos developed as a character, I realized he was not a savior at all. So I abandoned trying to put a religious spin to the story and just let the characters speak for themselves and drive the story where it had to go. I often find if I get out of the way of my characters speaking and interacting with one another, it usually works best for me and the story.
Helman feels less like a backdrop and more like a trap; how did you approach building the town’s atmosphere and moral decay?
I’ve been fascinated with ghost towns and small towns that are barely hanging on by a thread. I think they have a strong sense of history and local and regional culture. When I was creating this story, I researched a lot about these types of towns and the environment that surrounds them. I always like the idea that towns and places are another character of a story and deserve the equivalent care and development as any other person in the book. And because the town in this story is prominent to what goes on, the more details and personification I could provide, the more the town became a living, breathing entity.
Bobby is cynical, funny, wounded, and often frustrating. How did you balance making him flawed while still keeping readers invested in his journey?
Like I said before, originally he was intended to be a Christ-like figure. But the more I tried to go in that direction, the more fake and forced it became. So, I scrapped that and decided to focus on what made this character interesting to begin with. Character flaws are what make the individuals so accessible. We all have our own idiosyncrasies, and I think when we recognize them in characters in fiction or movies, we are drawn to them and their journeys. If successful, readers go along with the main character and think what they would do in the character’s position. I love doing that when I’m attached to a character, and am usually surprised to see that many of my decisions follow the ones that the main character has chosen.
What drew you to crime noir as the right style for telling this particular story?
I grew up reading pulp fiction books and have a lot of respect and admiration for writers like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammet, James M. Cain, Mickey Spillane, Cornell Woolrich, and especially Jim Thompson. I enjoy the stories and the characters that live in the worlds they create. Although I don’t always write in this genre, when I was in the development process of this story, I just thought the location and style was best suited for crime fiction. When I re-read sections of Three Days in Hell, I am convinced that this was the right vehicle for the story.
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Disgraced and desperate after an affair with his boss’s wife, Bobby Santos is exiled to Helman to hock Bibles for a crooked ministry that trades in faith the way others trade in contraband. The job is simple: unload the books or lose everything. But Helman is a dying desert town where sin is the only thriving industry, and salvation has no buyers. Helman belongs to JB and Amelia-beautiful, ruthless, and untouchable. Together they run every legal business and every criminal pipeline flowing through town, including a brutal cartel corridor trafficking drugs and underage girls north across the border. With nowhere else to go, Bobby embeds himself in Helman’s corruption, guided by a small-time thief named Bins who teaches him how the town really survives.
Bobby soon finds himself in trouble.
Trapped by blackmail, watched by killers, and unable to flee, Bobby is offered one last gamble during Helman’s infamous Chili Festival – a single night of excess that floods the town with outsiders and chaos. Bobby’s chance of escape closes when both spouses come to him separately with the same unthinkable proposal. Murder the other. On a rooftop beneath a burning sky, with a gun and two bullets in his hands, Bobby must choose which devil survives, and whether his own soul is already beyond saving.
Only To Be Completely Consumed
Freedom Boulevard follows two people looking for reinvention but instead find a city that tests their insecurities and vulnerabilities at every turn. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I’ve been a creative seeking the right avenues—and at times, reinvention—for much of my life. Andy and Sakeenah’s stories are a culmination of firsthand and secondhand experiences. They represent those moments when a creative type bets big on a metropolitan area as their new base, only to be completely consumed by the local culture, poverty, and politics.
Andy and Sakeenah have very different inner lives but parallel struggles—what made you decide to structure the novel in alternating first-person voices?
In the literary realm, I’d be daft not to credit the Urban Fiction writers who mastered the dual-perspective novel decades ago—people like K’Wan and Sister Souljah. I wanted to bring that fast-paced, modern structural style to a narrative that otherwise might have existed in the eras of Jack Kerouac or Charles Bukowski—assuming they stayed sober enough to actually go outside.
The book engages heavily with themes of exploitation, intimacy, and transactional relationships. What conversations were you hoping to open about those dynamics?
Exploitation, intimacy, and transaction are much bigger parts of the modern LGBT experience than most within the community would publicly admit. Grids on location apps dominate the hookup scene, making monogamous dating look more like a corporate PR stunt or a suburban rarity than the norm. The book forces the reader to confront these harsh realities. For example, Andy’s foray into escorting is what ultimately keeps him fed and sheltered, even if his surroundings are rapidly dilapidating. On the flip side, Sakeenah’s Islam keeps her head on straight, but it also births a world of hypocrisy and unrealistic expectations that she has to grapple with daily until she nearly loses her mind. Glimpses of characters like Tony Vee, Clyde, or Janice aren’t just setups for future installments; they’re raw slices of life pulled straight from those environments.
What do you hope readers carry with them after leaving the world of Freedom Boulevard?
Ultimately, I hope readers walk away with an authentic literary experience. This is not the type of “LGBT Fiction” designed to make you feel cozy or encourage you to buy a rainbow “Ally” pin. This is a cold glimpse of real-life problems hitting a real-life community in real-life cities. The series only expands from here, highlighting a myriad of characters across this diaspora.
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Andy Blackwell is a bisexual hip-hop artist who burned every bridge in Maryland to chase the neon lights of the West. But in Cordova, exposure isn’t free. Desperate to keep a roof over his head, Andy finds himself entangled in the brutal web of Tony Vee, a nightlife kingpin who treats human beings like expendable assets. Traded between seedy club promoters, lonely sugar daddies, and the criminal underworld, Andy is sprinting headfirst toward a dead end.
Sakeenah Bailey is a bipolar, trans Muslima writer fleeing the suffocating judgment of conservative Connecticut. She arrives in the desert seeking a creative awakening, but quickly drowns in the legalized, soul-numbing haze of the city’s medical marijuana industry. Trapped in a roach-infested motel and tangled in a violently toxic romance, Sakeenah trades her spiritual compass for a paycheck in a corporate weed factory.
They are two sides of the same counterfeit coin—strangers bleeding out in the same dystopian city. One will find a ladder out of the pit. The other will become a ghost in the machine.
Written with unapologetic, razor-sharp prose, Freedom Boulevard is a visceral, neon-noir descent into the American underbelly. Yusuf Blanton delivers an agonizing, authentic masterpiece about addiction, the dark side of the cannabis boom, queer survival, and the brutal cost of chasing a dream in a godless city.
Perfect for fans of gritty urban fiction, LGBTQ+ psychological dramas, and raw stories of addiction and redemption.
Freedom Boulevard
Freedom Boulevard, by Yusuf Blanton, is a raw, fast-moving novel about two people who arrive in Cordova looking for reinvention and instead find a city that tests every weak seam in their lives. Andy Blackwell comes west chasing music, nightlife, and queer belonging, admitting early on, “I was a rapper that yearned for recognition and a lost Queer in search of his proverbial tribe.” Sakeenah Bailey arrives with her own mix of fear, faith, ambition, and exhaustion, hoping the city might give her room to become someone new. Their stories unfold in alternating first-person chapters, giving the book the feel of two confessions running beside each other until their lives begin to rhyme in painful ways.
Cordova is the book’s real engine. Freedom Boulevard isn’t just a street full of clubs, motels, drugs, performers, creeps, hustlers, and neon. It’s a place that sells people the fantasy of freedom while charging them for every mistake they make. Blanton writes the city as a trap and a stage at the same time, where people come to be seen, to disappear, to make money, to get high, to pray, to perform, and to survive the night. The setting has a sweaty, lived-in quality, and the best scenes make you feel the cheap rooms, bad lighting, stale smoke, and nervous hope pressing in from every side.
Andy’s half of the novel follows an artist who wants recognition but keeps finding transactions where community should be. His world of clubs, promoters, hookups, landlords, clients, and empty promises is loud, funny, ugly, and increasingly dangerous. Sakeenah’s half is more inward but just as urgent. Her chapters wrestle with Islam, anxiety, family disappointment, weed, surveillance, abusive relationships, and the constant need to find shelter without losing herself. Together, they make the book feel less like a single plot and more like a map of two people trying to stay human in a city built to use them up.
Blanton’s style is big, profane, theatrical, and often funny in a bruised sort of way. The prose swings hard, sometimes piling image on image until the narration feels like a spoken-word performance, a panic attack, and a diary entry all at once. That intensity fits the characters, especially because both Andy and Sakeenah are trying to turn chaos into meaning. The book is full of sex, drugs, faith, poverty, ambition, and damage, but its deeper subject is storytelling itself: who gets reduced to a case file, who gets remembered, and who gets to turn pain into testimony.
Freedom Boulevard is a novel about survival as an act of authorship. Sakeenah’s journey gives the book its final shape, especially when she decides that “The pen was my new prayer mat and justice was my new singular aim.” That line captures what the novel is reaching for: not easy healing, but a way to make witness feel like purpose. It’s a harsh, messy, passionate book about people chasing freedom through places that rarely offer it cleanly, and it leaves behind the feeling of someone writing because silence would be another kind of death. I recommend this book to readers who like powerful, emotional stories about survival, resistance, and finding purpose through telling one’s truth.
Pages: 207 | ASIN : B0GSSR7FX4
Freedom Boulevard
L. Winfrey Young’s Freedom Boulevard offers a vivid journey through post-Civil War Kentucky, as it tells the story of four young African American girls grappling with their new sense of freedom in a world still scarred by slavery. Set in 1875, this historical fiction novel deftly explores the complexities of life during this transformative period, focusing on the lingering impact of slavery, the burgeoning civil rights movement, and the evolving racial and societal dynamics of the time. The narrative compellingly portrays the characters’ resilience in the face of adversity and their unwavering pursuit of a brighter future despite the unfair challenges they encounter.
One of the standout elements of this book is the intricate relationship between James Simmers and Charlotte. Their dynamic beautifully captures the nuanced nature of human emotions, illustrating their interactions of love and frustration. The book’s rich character development and the exploration of their emotional depths are a highlight, though, at times, the abundance of characters and the rapid shift between perspectives can be somewhat overwhelming. A more streamlined narrative could enhance the reading experience, yet those interested in historical and character-driven novels will likely appreciate the depth and detail.
Winfrey’s narrative style is bold and unflinching, particularly in portraying racial themes. The book does not shy away from depicting the harsh realities of racism and its deep-rooted presence in society, even post-slavery. This raw honesty in storytelling, while sometimes confronting, adds a powerful layer of authenticity to the book. It resonates personally, especially as it reflects the continuous struggle against racial prejudices and the internal conflicts faced by African-American communities.
Freedom Boulevard excels in immersing readers in a pivotal historical era, providing an insightful look into the enduring effects of slavery. Its compelling content makes it a significant read for those interested in historical narratives, the complexities of human relationships, and the ongoing journey toward social justice and equality.
Pages: 637 | ASIN : B0CP4ZN6LW
