The Dead Presidents Club

The Dead Presidents Club is not your usual historical fiction.  It is like nothing you have ever read before.  The macabre aspects of death are explored through the final moments of our presidents.  Their lives are reflected upon and their personalities are explored in a post-death quest for the meaning of life and death.  The mathematics of the Universe suggests that even a president would be foolish to take him or herself too seriously.

LOoks can be deceiving

Looks Can Be Deceiving  is a book of ten short stories that are thematically connected to the title.  The stories describe various situations where  our initial perceptions are inaccurate for one reason or another.  The discovery that not everything is as it first would seem is our biggest surprise, whether it be that the Pope is really a woman or the town's used car salesman is actually an angel in disguise.  The lens of time seems to redefine what we see, hear and feel.  First impressions are often a causality of new information.

Here is a brief preview of each story:

Her Holiness the Pope, is a tale of gender misidentification that has catastrophic implications.  A young woman is mistakenly presumed to be a man and chooses to remain silent about the confusion.  She attends the seminary and is ordained a priest where she joins a young class of church leaders that will change the face of Catholicism forever.

Marvin Sold Cars, is about a Norman Rockwell type of Texas town and a man everyone thought they knew.  After his passing, the small town discovered that Marvin had been much more than a purveyor of pre-owned automobiles.  He had been the town’s secret angel.  Everyone knew him in a different way.  Kindness and consideration were the trademarks of his social interaction.  It was his death that revealed even more of his many secrets.

Deathbed, is a collection of one man’s random thoughts about the sum of his life as he fades in and out of consciousness in his final living hours.  With death imminent, he reevaluates the experiences of his life and how time has changed his perspective.  The most painful part of his death are his regrets.

Voices, tells the story of a fifth century agrarian couple residing in the Yucatan peninsula who are the first to discover that parrots possess the unique ability to speak human language.  Sixteen hundred years later, we humans still cannot definitively classify their vocalizations as cognizance or mimicry.

Crash Landing, depicts a marooned alien struggling to stay alive on Earth.  Unusual alliances are the only option.

Heavenly Bodies, is a continuation of Crash Landing and the continued evolvement of familiar characters.  It seems the universe is teeming with unusual examples of intelligent life.  I suspect there will be more episodes and maybe even a book devoted to these connected stories.

Evil Twins, is about art theft and deception on many levels.  Larceny is represented by the complex equation, 1 + 1 = 1.  Don’t always believe what your eyes are telling you.

Pepe, is a light romp through Paris exploring the street art created by resident artists that share a disdain for commercialism.  Beat artist, Suede Barstow, shares his French adventure with me.

Pepe Le Franc Paintings from the story Pepe

The Bells of Redcross Way offers explanations on the evolvement of our English language.  After four hundred years, many of the colloquialisms of seventeenth century England continue to exist with only slight variations to their meaning.

The Lyin’ King is a personal cathartic exercise that I almost did not include because it will offend many of the brain-dead and violent Trump supporters.  Real patriots defend our democracy rather than attempt to destroy it with lies and violence.