Blog Archives
Autocrat
Autocrat, by Jeff Nesbit, is a scalding political satire about Rex Vanner, a broke-but-blustering reality-TV mogul who runs for president as a bargaining stunt and discovers that grievance, spectacle, and shamelessness can become a governing philosophy. With the help of the coldly analytical Elias Thorne and a cast of zealots, billionaires, opportunists, and true believers, Rex turns public life into a ratings machine until the joke hardens into authoritarian rule.
I found the book both funny and queasy-making, which is exactly the pressure point it seems designed to hit. Nesbit writes in broad, acid colors: gold rooms, trembling aides, performative cruelty, political rallies that feel like bad comedy clubs with worse consequences. The satire isn’t subtle, but subtlety would almost feel dishonest here. The novel works because it understands the grotesque intimacy between entertainment and power, how a crowd can be trained to mistake humiliation for truth.
What I appreciated most was the way the book treats autocracy not as a lightning strike but as a series of small permissions. People laugh, excuse, profit, rationalize, and soon the machinery is moving on its own. Rex is ridiculous, but the people around him are often more frightening because they are less ridiculous. Elias, Jared Caine, and Julian Silk give the novel its colder edge; they see Rex not as a leader but as a door left unlocked. That makes the book feel less like a parody of one man and more like an autopsy of a culture willing to be entertained into submission.
This book is for readers of political satire, dystopian fiction, authoritarian thrillers, and near-future satire, especially those who like their comedy barbed and their warnings delivered with a grin full of broken glass. Readers who enjoyed Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here will recognize the same dread, though Nesbit’s version is louder, more media-drunk, and built for the age of screens. Autocrat is a brutal carnival mirror held up to democracy, and the most disturbing thing about it is how familiar the reflection looks.
Pages: 289 | ASIN : B0GX313SRZ
Absurdist Adventure
Lies, Lust, and Larceny follows twin sisters whose retirement plans spiral into an adventure that includes identify theft, Norwegian prison fantasies, and an alien encounter. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I saw a YouTube video about Norwegian prisons and how progressive and humane they are. They looked like dorms or three-star hotels with great food and full amenities! I wondered if anyone had ever tried to get arrested and convicted to gain long-term entrance to these comfortable facilities. Then I built a story around how to + make it happen and I came up with Lies, Lust, and Larceny.
Lilah is more curious and open to adventure, while Laylah is often fueled by envy. How did you develop their contrasting personalities?
I tried to imagine two sides to any given personality and divided them in half and came up with Lilah and Laylah. I wanted them to be mirror images of each other with similarities as well as differences.
The novel often feels like someone telling an unbelievable story over coffee. Was creating that conversational energy part of your writing approach?
I wanted it to come across with the feel of an absurdist adventure novel that spirals out of control with every twist and turn. I wanted the reader to suspend disbelief enough to entertain the notion of alien beings, a 4th dimension, and going to prison on purpose.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
Lies, Lust, and Larceny is part 1 of a 4-part series with an addendum. All the parts have been published and are available on Amazon.com.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Amazon
Who do those recidivists’ crimes hurt more?
Would Jesus Do Time? is a satirical drama that reimagines Jesus in present-day America, discovering the faults with the modern-day justice system. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The inspiration comes from firsthand experience. I’m currently incarcerated, been locked up 22 years. But what inspired me most was how a lot of people don’t know what goes on in here. Like, how slavery has NOT been completely abolished. It’s thick in the penal system. In the 13th Amendment, it says slavery’s been abolished “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”
Some people may say, “Good. Teach prisoners the value of a hard day’s work.” There’s a bit of sophistry at play with that line. We’re literally “paid” pennies for an entire eight-hour day of labor that our blood, sweat, and (sometimes) tears provide. People who’ve never held a legitimate job in their lives will never understand the value of an honest dollar.
Being forced to work against your will when you’d rather educate yourself demonstrates the lack of value they place on our lives. Do you think this makes us respect authority? Slavery dramatically decreases our self-worth and has far-reaching effects. 85% of prisoners will be released one day, and the recidivism rate is currently at 75%. Who do those recidivists’ crimes hurt more? You. They hurt you, the average everyday citizen.
These are merely some of the thoughts that went into Would Jesus Do Time? I also knew the visceral reactions that’d bubble to the surface for people upon seeing Jesus behind bars. When you wear prison scrubs, you feel you’re no longer perceived as human, but. . . “expendable,” “judged,” “condemned.” They’re not a factor in polite society, the rational-minded say to themselves. People forget how Jesus was tried, found guilty, and sentenced just like every other prisoner. So, not much has changed with the biblical version of events. I simply wrapped Jesus in a story that happens every single day in America.
Writing Jesus as a dramatic character is a bold undertaking. What were the biggest challenges in approaching that task?
The biggest challenge was trying to be as respectful as possible of this religious figure while also giving Jesus a sense of humor. As you can see from my answer to your first question, we’re dealing with heavy subject matter here. You can’t have purchasers wanting to freaking kill themselves while reading your work. My job is to entertain. I’m an award-winning writer, and I better act like it by giving readers their money’s worth. If I don’t, I’ll stop selling books.
I want people to laugh, feel their adrenaline pump, and experience a rollercoaster ride through my writing. That’s what a professional word entertainer is supposed to do in my humble opinion, and if they take something deeper with them after they set my book down in this process? Even better. = )
What do you think satire can accomplish that a more straightforward drama cannot?
Comedy and drama go hand in hand. The best comedies are draped in dramatic clothing. Satire merely allows a writer to cut deep into a reader’s soul, because you let down your guard when you’re laughing, right? So, as those walls are lowered, the exceptional author can get surgical without the reader being aware that they’re being implanted with a knowledge they’ll carry with them throughout the rest of their lives.
What spiritual question do you hope readers and audiences continue wrestling with after the curtain falls?
The spiritual question I want people to grapple with is, Now that I’ve brought you into a world that’s deliberately hidden away from prying eyes, what are you going to do with this newfound insight? Do you enjoy giving back to your community? Do you realize the smallest of loving gestures can make a great impact on the world, similar to the butterfly effect? Does doing something positive for someone even appeal to you? If so, there is tremendous beauty in you. Show the world what you’re capable of.
Author Links: GoodReads | X | Facebook | Website
Agent Bigglesby: Not Dead Yet
Agent Bigglesby: Not Dead Yet, by James P. Rochester Jr. III, is a satirical spy comedy about Herbert Bigglesby, an 84-year-old former superspy who has been officially declared dead, tucked away in a senior living facility, and expected to fade quietly into the background. Herbert, naturally, has other plans. What begins as a comic portrait of a retired agent refusing to accept retirement turns into a wild genre-bending romp involving old enemies, senior scams, family complications, cruise-ship chaos, and one last chance for Herbert to prove he is still useful, even if his body, his colleagues, and common sense keep suggesting otherwise.
What struck me first was how committed the book is to its own absurdity. Rochester writes with a restless comic energy, piling jokes on top of references, misunderstandings, wordplay, and physical mishaps until the story feels almost like a spy movie being performed in a nursing home after someone misplaced the script. Sometimes that works beautifully. The opening scenes at Sunset View are sharp, funny, and oddly vivid, with all the fluorescent lighting, bad smells, institutional blandness, and bruised pride of old age turned into the setting for espionage. I liked that the humor is not gentle. It pokes. It elbows. It’s often ridiculous, but it also has a clear target: the way society files people away once they are no longer convenient.
The author’s biggest choice is also the book’s biggest risk. Herbert is not always easy to like. He’s vain, inappropriate, stubborn, and trapped in an old version of himself that the world has mostly outgrown. Still, I found myself curious about him because the book does not treat aging as a soft-focus lesson in wisdom. It treats it as a collision. Herbert’s mind is full of old missions, old habits, old desires, and old wounds, while the present keeps interrupting him with pills, liability forms, family demands, and people who do not remember why he mattered. That tension gives the comedy more weight than I expected. Beneath the jokes about spycraft and senior living, there is a real question here: what happens to a person when the role that gave them meaning is taken away?
As a work of comic spy satire, Agent Bigglesby: Not Dead Yet will appeal most to readers who enjoy humor, parody, and stories that move fast even when their hero doesn’t. Readers who enjoy messy, loud, self-aware comedy with a surprising amount of heart should have a good time. I would recommend it to fans of spy spoofs, aging antiheroes, and books that are willing to be silly while still asking what dignity, purpose, and usefulness look like near the end of life.
Pages: 310 | ASIN : B0GSPKG78M
A Postcard From the Adirondacks
A Postcard from the Adirondacks begins with a mysterious postcard bearing one word, “Come,” and sends its narrator, Edward Storie, into a strange Adirondack adventure where journalism, folklore, philosophy, and canine loyalty collide. Ed, a cub reporter and aspiring fiction writer, is drawn into the orbit of Dr. Zorba Kildeere, a pseudo-scientific visionary whose plans for chemically pacifying humanity come with one monstrous condition: a future without dogs. When Melony Noon escapes Kildeere’s Rookery, Ed and his talking dog, Skipper, enter a wilderness populated by cryptids, phantoms, tricksters, and old mountain magic in a rescue mission that becomes far larger than one missing woman.
What I enjoyed most about this book is its refusal to behave. It’s part tall tale, part backwoods quest, part satire of scientific hubris, and part love letter to the Adirondacks. Pontacoloni writes the forest as if it has a pulse, a private vocabulary, and a sly sense of humor. The narrative wanders, but often in the way a wooded trail wanders: taking detours toward local lore, odd taxonomy, old literary ghosts, and the metaphysics of dogs. Skipper is the book’s great engine of charm. He’s funny, learned, prickly, brave, and exactly the kind of dog who could make a reader accept the impossible before breakfast.
Readers who want a clean and swift plot may find themselves occasionally caught in the underbrush of digression. Yet I came to appreciate that abundance as part of the book’s peculiar spell. Pontacoloni isn’t merely telling a rescue story; he’s building a private Adirondack cosmology where Sasquatch, tarot phantoms, oxytocin, Emily Dickinson, James Fenimore Cooper, and a French Brittany can all share narrative oxygen. The prose can be playful and philosophical, but beneath the whimsy is a sincere moral center: a world that loses its dogs has already misplaced its soul.
This book will best suit readers who enjoy fantasy adventure, cryptid fiction, magical realism, satirical science fiction, talking-animal stories, and folklore-infused literary quests. It reminded me at times of Douglas Adams filtered through James Fenimore Cooper, with a dash of Christopher Moore’s comic irreverence and a muddy pawprint all its own. A Postcard from the Adirondacks is a strange and spirited romp through myth and mountain shadow, carried by the kind of loyalty only a good dog can teach.
Pages: 229
Disgruntled Entitlement
Debt centers around two lawyers whose lives are becoming defined by the debt they bear as they face the aftermath and lessons learned following a colleague’s tragic suicide. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The novel is a retelling of Crime and Punishment in the same way The Stranger probably was. The contention being that the moral architecture of the age has started dictating different moral conclusions. The book uses the arcs of murder and prostitution almost allegorically, and I think it was this general theme that drove the plot more than anything else. I saw Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice a couple months after finishing Debt, and that film sort of corroborated the emergence of this new archetype for me. Someone who transgresses a moral boundary and not only feels no direct remorse but whose life gets immeasurably better as a result, and who suffers no consequences. That’s sort of the meditation here. I’m also a corporate attorney.
The voice is frantic, funny, disgusted, and intensely precise. How did you develop that tone?
I wrote another novel, – -, where the narrator of Debt is the main character. The world of that novel is more straightforwardly absurd, so when Wade is situated in a world that’s ostensibly “normal,” it’s like he’s still suspended in that absurdity. He approaches the world of Debt as if it were its own Invisible City, and I think that’s where the tone comes from. This place is pretty absurd if you think you’re only visiting.
How did you balance empathy for Bill and K with the satire directed at their choices and ambitions?
That’s a good question. It’s very true that Bill and K are representatives of one of the least sympathetic classes in our society, the HENRYs. It’s also true that their situation is almost entirely self-inflicted. What do they have to complain about, really? The book leans into this some. On another level, their problems and their misery are kind of a way of saying that it doesn’t get better for anybody. Like that Malvina Reynolds song, “and there’s doctors, and there’s lawyers and business executives,” but even they can’t get a little box anymore. There’s a disgruntled entitlement and a pessimism that make the book possible. We forget to pray for the HENRYs, and so the HENRYs forget to pray for us.
If readers finish the novel haunted by one thing beyond the satire — the romance, the exhaustion, the fear, or the compromises — what do you hope lingers most?
Debt is a tax imposed by the capital class on the cost of social mobility. If you feel like you’ve been disappointed for so long that you’ve forgotten an alternative, at least you’re not alone. It’s not a hallucination. Things have gotten worse. They are getting worse. There are intractable logics at the core of our systems that we both suffer and enforce. And if you can find a way to fall in love and get married, then you should.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Website | Barnes & Noble | Amazon
Would Jesus Do Time?
Would Jesus Do Time? is a fierce, satirical stage work that imagines Jesus returning in present-day America, reenacting the cleansing of the temple, and discovering that the modern justice system has little patience for mercy, context, or holiness. After overturning tables in a church filled with Christian merchandise, Jesus is violently arrested, jailed, debated over by politicians, softened by visits from Mary and Mother Mary, and ultimately tried for crimes that the play frames as both legally plausible and spiritually grotesque. Along the way, the story moves through police brutality, prison labor, public defenders, media distortion, partisan hypocrisy, loneliness, shame, forgiveness, and the aching question beneath the title: would a society that claims to worship Jesus recognize him once he stood among the condemned?
I found the book at its strongest when it lets outrage and tenderness collide. The scenes inside the jail gave the story its most human pulse for me, especially the conversations with Don, Gunz, and Beaux. Beaux’s desire to be “something” beyond the narrow mythology of street fame lands with real sadness, because Jesus doesn’t simply scold him into goodness; he sees the entrepreneurial hunger beneath the damage. I also felt the ache of the visitation scene with Mary and Mother Mary, where the language of loneliness becomes more than a prison critique. It becomes a lament for all the ways incarceration strips a person of touch, responsibility, ordinary affection, and the small daily proofs of being alive. Chaffin is writing from a place of conviction, and that conviction gives even the roughest passages an unignorable heat.
The writing itself is brash, profane, theatrical, and deliberately unruly. The musical numbers can sometimes feel biting and funny, sometimes blunt, yet they also give the piece its unique feel. I admired the audacity of placing comedy beside spiritual dread, as when a guard’s crude “Step on a Turd” routine becomes a grotesque little window into dehumanization, or when the courtroom turns into a spectacle of performance, manipulation, and public appetite. There’s a real dramatic instinct here. The image of Jesus in an orange jumpsuit is provocative, but what stayed with me more was Jesus praying in fear before trial, Peter and Judas holding him, and the final guilty verdict hardening into a “modern-day crucifixion.” Those moments have a raw spiritual melancholy that cuts through the satire.
I came away from Would Jesus Do Time? feeling challenged and unexpectedly moved. Its force comes from discomfort, from the way it asks whether compassion is merely a word people admire until it demands something of them. This book has a unique and passionate voice. I’d recommend it to readers who are open to politically charged religious satire, prison justice narratives, experimental musical drama, and stories that use provocation not for shock alone, but to press hard on the soul.
Pages: 134 | ASIN : B0GTMLKK9R
