Three Novellas

Description

Three Novellas are, respectively; Soft Copy Revelations, The Young Republican, and House Of Gophers.

All three stories deal with protagonists that are suffering some kind of loss, or betrayal from their past, causing them bouts of depression, suicidal, or homicidal feelings.

The character Autumn in Soft Copy Revelations is an obsessive-compulsive personality; constantly haunted by memories of her father’s death, and unable to break free from the constraints of her mother’s overprotective parenting, even in adulthood. In her attempt to make new friends, and lead an ordinary life, she succumbs tragically to a suicidal kind of self-empathy.

In The Young Republican, the protagonist Josh, a type of sociopathic personality, is in a constant struggle with his family for inheritance from his grandfather, and, in a moral, or possibly immoral battle of revenge and faith with his father. Through Josh, we see the implications of misplaced virtue, misunderstood societal power, and an extreme, prototypical American, selfish promotion of the individual; by the individual, and for the individual, at any cost.

House Of Gophers, the final story in this trilogy, carries on the theme of an individual, a junior high school gym teacher named Larry, obsessed with the failures of his past. His embittered attitude toward his father, who left him and his mother when he was a young man, spills over into a deadly confrontation with his old high school football coach; whom Larry identifies as the positive role model, and father figure of his life. Larry, disabled in a car accident at a young age, battles through life with violent confrontations against all who he believes are oppressing him, or pitying him.

About the Author

Ben McFadden is a San Diego, California native, who has done work locally with the San Diego chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, and other non-profits. His first book, Withdrawals from a Legal Drug details with his attempt, and success at weaning himself from medication he was on since the age of nineteen to treat schizophrenia. He continues to live without medication, believing the episodes of paranoia and delusion he experienced in his late teens were brought about by his own reckless tendencies, and not by a mental illness.

Three Novellas is his second book to be published.