First, a quick update. The release date for Shoegazer has been delayed slightly due to the holidays and all the various other projects Rainstorm Press has in front of them. As it stands, Shoegazer will be out at some time in January. Trust me, I’ll keep everyone posted when a definite release date is announced; it should be any week now. For you Facebook users, like the Rainstorm Press page to keep current with all their recent news and titles. There’s a lot of great horror and mystery novels available from my publisher, with writers ranging from two different continents, at a variety of age groups and backgrounds. Lots of exciting stuff happening there.

In other news, I finished the first draft of my next book. Now, you writers out there understand that, while finishing anything is an accomplishment to be proud of, a first draft of a novel is more like the halfway point than the finish line. So while it’s encouraging to sit down and write a story from beginning to end (end for me was 105,000 words… by far the longest thing I’ve ever put to paper), the rewriting process reveals more problems and complications than solutions. It’s a step in the right direction, but I still see miles ahead of me before I feel comfortable enough to share the work with the rest of the world. The title as it stands right now is Midnight in a Perfect World and is something I’ve had in my head for a long time and I’m exciting to see manifest itself in the physical world.

And so, to refresh my batteries for the long period of revisions ahead, I went back and reread a book I have long considered to be my favorite of all time. Don DeLillo’s White Noise is postmodern fiction at its finest. Set in a small, rural college town, the novel tells the story of an unconventional family whose patriarch is a college professor, Jack Gladney, who made a name for himself in academia by founding the Hitler Studies program at the fictional College on the Hill. To describe too many aspects of the plot would be to do the work an injustice. This isn’t a book about story.  Certainly there are great story elements (such as a boy’s quest to break the world record for sitting in a cage of poisonous snakes, or the better known second portion of the novel: The Airborne Toxic Event (inspiring a band of the same name)), but what White Noise achieves is tapping into the most basic human component — the fear of death. Don DeLillo, through all the different quirks of his story with all his outlandish characters, explores the notion that no matter who you are, no matter how happy or successful or fulfilling your life is, one day you are going to die and you know it and the fear is crippling and it is debilitating and it is inescapable because it is true.

The novel is told through the first person narration of Jack Gladney and through his eyes we experience his fixation with his children and his wife, Babette, who seem to brim with optimism and the fire of life, also aware of their inevitable death but not allowing it to plague their thoughts the way it does his.  That is until he discovers that his wife’s fear of death rivals his own and had even gone under experimental trials for an underground drug, known as Dylar, said to inhibit the portion of the brain which provides the human fear of death.

White Noise is the book which really introduced me to the idea of what a novelist does. I’ve stated in the past that Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke was the reason I considered writing fiction in the first place, it was the first novel I read that I enjoyed at a visceral level; White Noise was the read that drove home how a fiction writer inserts ideas and thematic concepts into his/her narrative. Don DeLillo was the first writer I read who introduced the plot and plot elements as another character in the book, able to have the same effects on a reader as the setting or the protagonist/antagonist(s). The Airborne Toxic Event was the physical embodiment of Jack Gladney’s fear of death. Dylar seemed to be the solution to the problem Jack and Babette shared (another postmodern notion: better living through chemistry), but it seemed as though nothing either of them did would shake them of the realization that one day the world would continue and they would not be there to experience it. Arguably, the one thing that separates us from all other walks of life. We are always cognizant of the end.

More than anything, White Noise introduced to me that when readers say they want characters they can relate to, a writer can meet this need by introducing ideas that all people experience. And there is nothing more common than the fear of death.

In truth, I’m doing this book a disservice. I really should sit down and do a much longer analysis of a book that has meant more to me than any other I’ve ever read. I highly, highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good read. My only word of advice is don’t try to control the novel, don’t expect it to act in any certain way; accept it for what it is, allow it to do what it does and the final result will be extremely rewarding. But be warned, it will change the way you see the world. All subsequent books will pale in comparison.