Christian Larsen's Guide to Books & Booze

Time to grab a book and get tipsy!

Back by popular demand, Books & Booze, originally a mini-series of sorts here on TNBBC challenges participating authors to make up their own drinks, name and all, or create a drink list for their characters and/or readers using drinks that already exist. 

Today, Christian Larsen tells the tale of the perfect drink for his sophmore novel The Blackening of Flesh:

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Al Capone is losing his grip on Chicago, but he’s still out to protect his turf, so when an upstart gang led by the Cerutti brothers gather at a farmhouse to wait for a shipment of alcohol, he sends his thugs to do to them what they did to the Northsiders the previous Valentine’s Day: wipe them out.

Serafino ‘Sam’ Cerutti sits on the porch, waiting for the truck as he sips on his favorite drink, a concoction of malört and ginger ale his brothers laughingly call a ‘horse dick’. It’s April and cool, but Cerutti feels warm with the drink halfway into his bloodstream. That’s when the headlights appear, but they aren’t the headlights of a truck. They’re the headlights of a 1928 Cadillac…

Behold, the HORSE DICK. 

3 parts ginger ale, 1 part malort, and a splash of cranberry juice on the rocks with an orange wedge. Stir with a licorice whip, and you’re good. 

Rumor has it, it's the last thing Serafino Cerutti had to drink before the Capones closed in…

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Christian A. Larsen grew up in Park Ridge, Illinois and graduated from Maine South High School in 1993. He has worked as an English teacher, radio personality, newspaper reporter, and a printer’s devil.

His first novel, Losing Touch, was was named Best Horror Novel of 2013 in the Preditors & Editors™ Readers’ Poll. The story is about Morgan Dunsmore who, in the midst of a mid-life crisis, finds that he can walk through walls. 

The Blackening of Flesh is his second novel. In it, the grisly murder of five Prohibition-era mobsters starts as a means to get to know a girl, but becomes more than an obsession for a lonely high school graduate.

Larsen lives with his wife and two sons in the fictional town of Northport, Illinois. Follow him on Twitter @exlibrislarsen or visit www.exlibrislarsen.com.