Author Interview w/ C.G. Bauer

I can't think of a better way to ring in the New Year than with an author interview! Today, we have C.G. Bauer with us, author of Scars on the Face of God - a chilling tale of a small Pennsylvanian town where religion has gone horribly horribly wrong.

A native of Philadelphia, Chris shares with us how his personal experience with religion helped shape his novel, his feelings on the eBook craze, and which actors he would cast in the film version of Scars..

How old were you when you first realized that you had a knack for writing?

I wrote one sci-fi short story while I was in my twenties (on a typewriter), its sole hard copy weighed down by crusty Wite-Out and eventually lost to posterity during one relocation or another. I wrote no other creative/fictional pieces until I was in my forties when I began a novel about corporate greed, takeovers, layoffs, cross country relocation and, um, slow-pitch softball. (Sing along with me, kids: “Which of these things is not like the other…?”) Eight to ten years and 130,000 un-publishable words later The Rabbit, Stilled was finished, only to be relegated to back-up disk after an unsuccessful campaign at finding an agent, with a few agents mentioning that it was about 50,000 words too long for an unknown debut author. (Think shelf space.) But Rabbit may rise again someday after a rewrite, considering its main characters had their origins in Scars on the Face of God, this because Scars was purposely written as a shorter novel (88,000 words) after Rabbit to make Rabbit publishable. Good plan, right? The problem: Scars is paranormal/horror, Rabbit is mainstream contemporary. Hey, shit happens.

I also authored a tongue-in-cheek advice column during my early years at an insurance company, which, as my current employer, must remain unidentified due to the potential for copyright violations, unauthorized usage of trademarks, etc., etc. Suffice it to say the column was purportedly written by a cartoon dog named Snoppy, the frustrated and cynical twin brother of another cartoon beagle with nearly the same name yet arguably more significant notoriety.

Who or what was your greatest influence?

My greatest influences have been situational as well as author-inspired. For Scars it was my discovery of the real-life religious artifact manuscript Codex Gigas (“Giant Book”, aka “The Devil’s Bible”) when I surfed the net after asking the question “What if the Devil wrote his own Bible?” A Bohemian monk wrote the massive book in the 13th century as a penance because of one monastic indiscretion or another, and it was completed, according to legend, in one night with the help of the Devil. Over the centuries it became the spoil of a few European wars and now resides in Sweden’s Royal Library.

A hilarious telephone conversation I eavesdropped at a seaside restaurant, between a mobster wannabe and his nosey mother, led to my published-then-recorded short story titled “You’re a Moron,” seen in the pulp fiction e-zine Thuglit (Jan. 2009) and heard/performed in an audio version at Well Told Tales (Sept. 2009; 22,000 downloads and counting).

On the author front, I’ve been most inspired by Dean Koontz, specifically his supernaturally gifted yet wonderfully honest fry-cook character Odd Thomas. And I’m still enamored by the undereducated voice that Steve Shilstone used to relate his account of fictional baseball shortstop Chance Cain in his novel Chance.

In your interview with Philadelphia Stories, you mentioned that your novel – Scars on the Face of God – took 3 years to write. What was the writing and editing process like for you?

I work fifty-plus hour weeks at my day job plus my commute takes another two plus hours out of each workday. The only way I find time to write is if I don’t sleep, so I write and edit (and social network, surf the net, procrastinate, etc.) by rising by five a.m. seven days a week, working until seven a.m. on weekdays, nine a.m. on weekends. I found I like what I’ve written in the morning then I often find I don’t like that morning’s production in the evening, turning so cynical that my evening edits can occasionally produce a minus word count for the day. Since I’m also part of two writers’ critique groups I decided to replace my evening writing routine with critiquing other people’s work at night, rather than my own. Minus-word-count problem solved.

Your novel is set in Pennsylvania, yet has a very southern, gothic feel to it. How did you decide on its tone and setting?

I’m thinking the tone has been set by my first-person narrator-protagonist Wump Hozer, a blue-collar, salt-of-the-earth type who wears his heart on his sleeve. One reader compared the narrative to some of Mark Twain’s storytelling. Wump comes across as anti-religion, or at least anti-Catholic, while his wife Viola, whose pre-Wump plan was to join a convent, keeps him grounded in a belief in God. From Wump’s perspective God’s existence is rooted more in providing punishment, with said punishment often delivered to the wrong people.

Reasons the novel is set in Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia: I’m a Philadelphia native; Philadelphia has a very large and active Catholic population; the fictional St. Jerome’s Home for Foundlings is fashioned after St. Vincent’s Home, an iconic orphanage on the Delaware River that now provides services to unwed teenage mothers; and in deference to the leather tannery subplot, the greater Philadelphia area had a number of tanneries in operation in the nineteenth century.

All of your characters, for better or for worse, are incredibly unique and intensely flawed. What went into the creation of the four main characters - “Wump” Hozer, the narrator; Father Duncan, the new priest; Leo, a mentally handicapped boy; and Raymond, Leo’s blind, mute, wheelchair-ridden best friend?

Wump Hozer is a composite, fashioned after a now-deceased gruff uncle, a South Philly truck driver from a large family (one of eleven, twelve, maybe more siblings) who were major hellions during their younger years. There was also a real-life “Dogshit Johnny” (Wump’s childhood nickname), grandfather to a writer friend of mine, who did police his neighborhood in search of, ahem, dog shit, and who did deliver it to tanneries for money. Fertilizer is apparently an excellent leather-softening agent.

Father Duncan, former pro ballplayer who got his call to the priesthood from a dead relative, was a character made completely from scratch. I love baseball and wanted to provide an earthy, macho quality to his portrayal as a priest, a profession not typically known for its machismo. There’s also something about the potential of seeing a baseball bat-wielding priest that gets me going in the good guys vs. demons department.

Leo, Raymond and Teddy are fashioned after three children I remember from my northeast Philadelphia upbringing. As an adult I felt it odd that there were this many and more mentally and physically impaired kids in a small, four-city block area. Their real-life counterparts were what gave the tannery waste-dumping storyline its purchase. I believe the real-life Leo (real name Jimmy), probably in his early fifties now, may well still run errands for the people in the neighborhood.

If Scars on the Face of God were to be released as a movie, which actors would you cast to play the roles of “Wump”, Father Duncan, Leo, and Raymond?

Like most authors, I love being asked this question regarding something I’ve written.

Jeff Bridges as Wump. Looking forward to seeing Bridges’ portrayal of Rooster Cogburn in the remake of True Grit, and I loved his cantankerous country-western singer protagonist in Crazy Heart.

As Father Duncan, the late Merlin Olsen. He was a soft-spoken giant of a man, NFL Hall of Famer, a football announcer, and a supporting actor from Little House on the Prairie. Hey, with all the new zombie science out there and a decent Hollywood special effects team, we should be able bring him back for this role. Okay-fine, if I have to go with someone living, Joaquin Phoenix. I loved his baseball swing in M. Night Shyamalan’s crop circles thriller Signs, plus his Johnny Cash portrayal in Walk the Line proves he looks great in black.

Leo is a no brainer. Leonardo DiCaprio can borrow from his Arnie Grape role in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. (Yes, at age thirty-six DiCaprio could play a ten-year-old boy, he’s that good an actor.)

As Raymond, Stephen Hawking. That was too easy.

Directing: M. Night Shyamalan. This would be just the vehicle for him to return to his roots as a premier teller of eerie Philadelphia stories. Plus he’s a Philly native. You listening, M?

Religion plays a large role in Scars. How did your 12 years of Catholic School influence its plot?

In elementary school I was an altar boy. Plus—surprise—I was also afraid of the nuns. Standard fear stuff like not wanting to get cracked across the knuckles with a ruler, avoiding after-school detention with snoring elderly bearded female gnomes robed in black, avoiding embarrassment at not having word-for-word recall of my Catechism, that sort of thing. In Catholic high school not much changed: Afraid I’d get cracked across the face by a hall-patrolling, yardstick-wielding priest (the school’s “disciplinarian”), then contending with detention (called “jug”) after bitching to said disciplinarian for his said cracking across my said face. I’m now more of a cradle and grave Catholic, getting back to church for baptisms, weddings and funerals only. As I’ve gotten older I prefer to be more attuned to simply treating other living things the way I’d like to be treated and calling that my religion.

This novel was originally released as an eBook, and earned you a finalist slot in the 2010 EPIC awards. As a writer and a reader, what is your take on the rise of eBooks and eReaders?

I’m loving the eBook revolution. While I admit as an older fart I’d rather read ink on paper, I love the idea of generating customer interest in a product that can be satisfied nearly instantly by downloading it on the spot. Impulse buying at its finest. Point, click, sold, delivered! A published novelist friend mentioned this real-life scenario: He attended a writers conference as a panelist, visited an audience table, was soon told that everyone at the table had downloaded his novel to their Kindles by the time he’d finished answering their questions. Yet even with this endorsement I fess up to not owning an eReader of any kind just yet. It’s not because I’m too set in my printed word ways. It’s simply because I have a stack of unread print novels that I’m determined to finish first before I load up a Kindle or some other device with more unread novels. There are only so many hours in a day…

What are you currently reading?

I just finished the non-fiction NYT bestseller Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern, now a TV sitcom starring William Shatner. Hilarious, tears-in-my-eyes, lol book and a quick read. No feel for the sitcom but somehow I don’t see the blue-humored charm translating well on network TV, considering its charm has so much to do with its f-bomb and equivalent content. Justin’s father’s quotes are so incredibly irreverent, politically incorrect and raunchy that the reader has him instantly pegged as either a truck driver, hockey player or drill sergeant, and all of them in need of more fiber. Wrong on all counts. His real-life dad, now retired, taught nuclear medicine! Unbelievable. Currently reading Patient Zero by multiple Bram Stoker Award winner and NYT bestselling author Jonathan Maberry. Outstanding premise: zombies being used as pawns in a terrorist plot. Excellent read. Also in my queue: Jonathan’s second installment in the series, The Dragon Factory; another non-fiction offering, Jeanne Denault’s Sucking Up Yellow Jackets, a humorous yet somewhat tragic memoir about raising an Asperger’s Syndrome child who was fixated on motorcycles and explosives.

What can we expect from you next?

I’m into the second half of a standalone novel with the working title Hop Skip Jump, a paranormal mystery about reincarnation and channeling. One sentence summary: What happens when souls try to come back to where they’re needed the most and other entities are hell-bent on not letting that happen? Plus my comedic/tragic horror short story “Zombie Chimps from Mars” will be coming out in this winter’s print edition of Shroud Magazine (www.shroudmagazine.com), publication date pending.

What websites/authors/novels would you recommend to our audience?

I recommend my small press publisher’s website (drolleriepress.com), publisher of legend and fantasy fiction. I also recommend my own website (cgbauer.net) of course, but it’s a cautious recommendation in that it’s currently undergoing significant reconstruction.

I’ve found myself visiting crime fiction websites more often these days, this because I’d like to write some longer crime fiction pieces. Pulp fiction websites: Thuglit, Plots with Guns, Beat to a Pulp. Horror websites: Horror Bound, everywritersresource.com/horrormagazines (hundreds of horror magazines). Authors I’m following nowadays: Jonathan Maberry is hitting his stride in horror (adult and YA) and comics; new novelist Dennis Tafoya is making waves with his crime fiction (Dope Thief, The Wolves of Fairmount Park); the venerable Stephen King; Jeffrey Deaver; Dean Koontz.

Thanks much for having me here, Lori. Happy reading and blogging in 2011, to you and those who follow you. And if folks are interested in contacting me for signed copies of Scars on the Face of God they can do so at cntbauer101@yahoo.com.

Indie Spotlight: C.G. Bauer's SCARS ON THE FACE OF GOD

Back in 2010, I reviewed C.G. Bauer's Scars on the Face of God, a book I had longed to read and, when I finally got my hands on it, really enjoyed. It's this slow, chilling southern-gothic tale of a town with some nasty secrets to hide and it really blew me away. 

This morning's spotlight features an excerpt from the book, provided by C.G. as a promotional peek, because starting today through Halloween night, Scars is free to download on amazon.  Take it from me, if you haven't read it yet, now is the perfect opportunity to score a copy for your kindle!

Excerpt from SCARS ON THE FACE OF GOD: THE DEVIL’S BIBLE. The novel is set mostly in 1964. The protagonist storyteller is Wump Hozer, a 65-year-old church custodian. An orphan, he never made it out of the sixth grade. “Wump” of course is a nickname. It comes from the sound a crowbar makes when it hits a man’s head. Here is Wump giving us some backstory. --- Chris Bauer

A grudge in the hands of the rich and powerful is a terrible thing. Grudges in the hands of their hired help are no less terrible, but with fewer ways to satisfy them they for sure have a longer life.

            The year was 1935, and a skin rash that started on my right wrist and moved north onto my arm and chest was what finally made me leave the tannery. This and Viola’s second miscarriage, plus one confrontation I’d had with Mister-Fucking-Laughing-Pile-of-Shit-College-Boy Hughie Volkheimer soon afterwards, him a freshly minted graduate who his old man had made into a tannery supervisor, and me ten years older, just trying to make a living. Leaving the tannery was the best thing I could have done for myself. Best thing for Hughie, too, otherwise I might have killed him.

            “You there,” he’d called to me on that last day, his finger tapping the air like a hen pecking a barnyard, “Hozer. Hop on down next to that bin, grab a shovel and start loading up that truck’s payload. We’re short back here today.”

            Me and him were the only two people on the tannery loading dock. I was dumping parts of a cow carcass into an open metal box, which was riling up the flies inside the box pretty good. It was then I seen that more than a day’s worth of waste was sitting under them buzzing flies, all mixed in with leaking cans of bleach-based cleaning solvent plus other used leather tanning chemicals. I wanted no part of what he was asking.

“I’m a tanner, not a cleanup guy,” I said, shaking my tilted wheelbarrow. A pesky piece of unidentifiable cow scrap refused to budge; I pushed it off with my hand. More buzzing flies. “Get Otto to do it,” I told him. Except I already knew what an extra day of cow parts sitting in the box meant: Today there weren’t no Otto.

            Out back of the tannery had been, and I expect still is, a half-buried lagoon of arsenic-based insecticides and tanning chemicals, plus hundreds of barrels of crud-eating machinery detergents and other tannery process by-products, including lead and chromium. The industrial revolution by way of the Three Bridges local tannery industry was doing its damnedest to revolutionize the few small foothills and one green valley on this back section of the Volkheimer property, a couple of hundred acres or so that weren’t more than a football field away from a creek feeding the Wissaquessing River. The creek bank had turned into dead space, starting from the pits where animal hides and hair and other slaughterhouse wastes lay rotting, then fanning out across acres of what had once been scrub pine akin to them barrens in New Jersey. It wasn’t like the Jersey Pine Barrens scenery ever actually looked good even though the earth was alive, but it for sure looked a whole lot better than the singed armpit of a spread hidden in the back of the tannery’s property.

            “Otto’s under the weather today,” Hughie said, “so I want you to do it.”

            Under the weather the prick called it. Christ, Otto had been wheezing for months, which weren’t no surprise considering the chemicals he inhaled. Weren’t but a few years earlier another kraut fella who handled the tannery’s waste, the one before Otto, showed up dead in the north woods, found first by the local wildlife then afterwards, what was left of him at least, by hunters. Cause of death, a Mauser shot to the temple, self-inflicted according to his note. The real cause of death, or what made him pull the trigger, was tumors all over his lungs. The man was all of thirty-eight years old.

            “Like I said, Hughie, it’s not my job.”

            “You’ll address me as Mr. Volkheimer, and your job is what I tell you it is, Hozer.” Hughie unfolded his arms and gave a gentleman’s tug to the bottom of his vest with both hands, liberating his chunky neck from a starched shirt collar. “Start loading that waste and those solvent cans in your wheelbarrow and get moving. You know where it goes.”

            The owner’s son was all Hughie amounted to, but this meant that compared to the rest of us, he shit lavender and roses. Still, I weren’t never one for ponying up to authority that hadn’t really earned it. “Sorry, Mister Volkheimer, but I won’t be doing that. I’m heading inside now to get back to work.”

            I turned my back on him and started off, expecting maybe I’d get a biting comment or two, but what came out of his mouth stopped me cold.

            “Do what I say now, Hozer, or I’ll have you sacked. Then you’ll wish for your wife to miscarry every time, since you won’t be able to support a family.”

            Hughie didn’t stay upright much long after that, and he was lucky to have come away with only a few fractured ribs and a sore jaw, and the gooey yellow contents of one of them open solvent cans stuffed down the pants of his vested management suit. It took three men to pull me off him that day, with the same three men escorting me out of that fucking tannery, me vowing never to return. I kept the vow for six years, right up to the day Otto’s wife asked me to collect her deceased husband’s work belongings. Cause of his death: tumors on his lungs.

Scars on the Face of God: The Devil's Bible can be purchased on Amazon: amzn.to/tV3K0g. C.G. Bauer can be found on facebook. 

Review: Scars on the Face of God

Read 12/3/10 - 12/08/10
Stars: 4 - Strongly Recommended
Pgs:253

I have wanted to read this book for a long, long time. I spent uncountable hours searching bookstore shelves, library sales, used book sales... all for nothing. It seemed like this book and I were just not meant to be.

Until, on a whim, I reached out to it's author and asked for a copy to review here on the blog. A huge thank you must go out to C.G. Bauer for suppling me with a copy of his elusive novel!

Initally set in Pennsylvania at the turn of the century, two young boys from the local orphanage are out in the early morning collecting frozen piles of dog crap (oh yes, they were) when they spy a woman carrying a small , squirming bundle across an enclosed bridge. As they watch, the woman throws the bundle into the river, followed by a gunshot. One of the boys, Johnny, dives in after the drowning baby, and believing he has retrieved it, carries it back to the shore, where he hands it over to his friend. As they unwrap the bundle.... They realize that what they had just witnessed has happened before - many many times before.

Foward 50+ years in the same town, and Johnny, known to most as "Wump", finds himself reliving the horror of that morning all over again when tiny baby skeletons are found floating in the sewer-water that has suddenly flowed into a hole that's been dug out for the foundation of a new restaurant.

In the midst of this, the town acquires a new priest, Father Duncan. He and Wump, along with two disabled boys, Leo - a mentally handicapped boy - and his blind, mute, wheelchair-ridden best friend Raymond, launch their own personal investigation into the town's deep dark secret regarding the dead babies, and the mysterious Devil Bible which they find in the possesion of one of the nun's in the orphanage.

Scars on the Face of God is a slow, southern-style gothic tale that manages to creep and crawl deep under your skin. Author C.G. Bauer tears religion apart and attempts to put it back together using the conflicting beliefs of Wump and Father Duncan - two men with very different views on God, and God's part in creation and the suffering of human kind.

Creating characters with incredibly flawed personalities, Bauer used their damaged pasts to show why each man felt the way they did about the Catholic Church. Father Duncan, an ex-professional baseball player, heard the call to religion and puts his faith unquestionably in God and the church. Wump, on the other hand, lived life according the rules of the church and lost his faith after watching his son needlessly suffer and die of Lukemia.

A powerfully chilling novel of what the power of religion can do to a small, poor town. And what faith, or the lack thereof, can do to each of it's inhabitants.

I thoroughly lost myself in this novel, and I strongly urge you to do the same!

"Scars on the Face of God" Giveaway

The first TNBBC giveaway of 2011!!

This one is coming to you compliments of C.G. Bauer himself...

You may remember me reviewing Scars on the Face of God at the beginning of December, the book that I searched high and low for in bookstores, book sales, and library sales for over a year... and fell hard and fast for!

Here is the description from Goodreads:

"Hex signs protect every barn and outbuilding. The local tannery spews its poison on the land and in the river. And babies disappear at birth.

An orphan and one-time felon who earned his nickname -from the sound a crowbar makes when it hits a man-s head,- Johannes -Wump- Hozer is now the custodian of Our Lady of the Innocents parish in Three Bridges, PA. Wump is old and tired. He-s fought all his life against the tannery-s waste, against God, and against the blind eyes of his good neighbors. Nowadays he tries to ignore the old priest-s exploits with the young women of the parish and the strangeness surrounding the local orphanage, and does what good he can for his wife, the church, the sisters who run the orphanage, and the poor orphans themselves.

Then childhood memories and strange presentments begin to plague Wump when a brick wall unearthed at the site of a new restaurant collapses, and raw sewage carries hundreds of baby bones into the pit left behind. Looks like the devil-s made Three Bridges his playground, and Wump needs to find out why; the babies keep screaming and he has to make it stop."

Chris is offering up one signed copy of his novel.

The giveaway is for US Residents only

and ends midnight January 7th.

Here's how to enter:

1. Post a comment telling Chris and I why you want to read his book and be sure to leave a way for me to contact you.

2. Please do not enter if you have won a book from TNBBC in the past three months. We want to make sure we are sharing the book-winning experience with everyone!

Chris Bauer's Would You Rather

Bored with the same old fashioned author interviews you see all around the blogosphere? Well, TNBBC's newest series is a fun, new, literary spin on the ole Would You Rather game. Get to know the authors we love to read in ways no other interviewer has. I've asked them to pick sides against the same 20 odd bookish scenarios....

Chris Bauer's 

Would You Rather

Would you rather write a book without using conjunctions or have every sentence of your book begin with one?

No conjunctions. Since you didn’t say what kind of book, we’ll go with a children’s picture book, and we’ll leave out all the conjunctions, even in the title. I have one in mind. The rethinking of a classic: DICK. JANE. ZOMBIES. FUN. 

Would you rather write in an isolated cabin that was infested with spiders or in a noisy coffee shop with bad Muzak?

Coffee shop, Muzak, piece of cake. Seriously, if you gave me a piece of cake to go with the coffee and the shitty Muzak, I could probably make it work. And an MP3 player and earbuds. And other snacks. And some insecticide, in case the coffee shop is near the cabin with the spiders.

Would you rather think in a language you could understand but write in one you couldn’t read, or think in a language you couldn’t understand but write in one you could read?

You’re killing me here. This question may well be in English but I still can’t translate it well enough to answer it because it mentions three distinct places involving language: thinking, writing and reading. Best I can tell, we have a writer who is multilingual in one capacity and not multilingual in another, so which shortcoming would he be willing to live with?

So let’s do this: a pivot. Would you rather have pinkeye or blue balls? I’ll take pinkeye over blue balls any day.

(If I have to answer the question, it would be the former—able to think in a language you could understand, etc.—not the latter. I’d lose it if I couldn’t understand my own thoughts.)

Would you rather write a book you truly believe in and have no one read it or write a crappy book that comprises everything you believe in and have it become an overnight success?

The latter. I can always write a second book that isn’t as crappy (don’t we all think we’ll do better the second, third, fourth time around?), especially if the first one makes some good coin and affords me the time and outlet to do it.

Would you rather have everything you think automatically appear on your Twitter feed or have a voice in your head narrate your every move?

You’ve been reading my tweets, haven’t you? Who is this really? I promise to filter my tweets from this point forward. I suppose I’d go with the former. To me living with brain dumps and their impact are far better than paranoid schizophrenia.

Would you rather your books be bound and covered with human skin or made out of tissue paper?

The human skin thing.

BONUS TRIVIA! SCARS ON THE FACE OF GOD, my first published novel, has as a central plot item a real-life 13th century manuscript called The Devil’s Bible that was written on what? ANSWER: Skin! It’s composed of 310 leaves of vellum claimed to be made from the skins of 160 donkeys, or perhaps calfskin.  SKIN IS IN!

Would you rather read naked in front of a packed room or have no one show up to your reading?

The reading naked thing. I always seem to survive the naked thing in my dreams (late for a final exam, didn’t study, I’m commando, then omigod where did my pants go?), so I’ll go with that.

Would you rather your book incites the world’s largest riot or be used as tinder in everyone’s fireplace?

How can anyone not pick riotous chaos versus being burned and lost forever? RIOTOUS CHAOS! LIGHT MY TORCH! RIOTOUS CHAOS!

Would you rather give up your computer or pens and paper?

Give up pens and paper, but this answer really hurts. I love having learned how to write in cursive, and having learned to print properly, but it has to be this way. It’s where we’re headed. Conserves trees, too. Add to this, I’ve gotten looks from my critique peers because I write my feedback in cursive on hard copies of their work. They would be mucho happy if I handed in critiques at our in-person meetings that were all typed. Writing in cursive is dying art.

Would you rather have every word of your favorite novel tattooed on your skin or always playing as an audio in the background for the rest of your life?

I’m not a tattoo guy, so I gotta go with the audio. Speaking of which, did I tell you that my political thriller JANE’S BABY came out in audio in August? No? Well yes, it did, and thanks for asking.

Would you rather meet your favorite author and have them turn out to be a total jerkwad or hate a book written by an author you are really close to?

The hate the book thing. An author can’t hit a home run every time. I just saw the movie Can You Ever Forgive Me? The story is about bestselling author Lee Israel falling on hard times so badly that she starts faking letters by famous authors and playwrights and selling them to pay her rent. It’s from her memoir, and in it she makes Tom Clancy out to be just such a jerkwad. Clancy wasn’t my favorite author, but he was still significantly revered. After this movie, maybe not.

Would you rather your book have an awesome title with a really ugly cover or an awesome cover with a really bad title?

Awesome cover art, bad title. We see this every day in many a genre.

Would you rather write beautiful prose with no point or write the perfect story badly? 

Write the perfect story badly. One example: THE DA VINCI CODE. Not perfect, but still a good story, yet arguably not a literary masterpiece. I do confess that I liked it. DON’T JUDGE ME.

Would you rather write only embarrassingly truthful essays or write nothing at all?

No contest here: write the damn essays. I already embarrass myself in so many other ways. Hopefully the essays would be entertaining on some level.

Would you rather be reduced to speaking only in haiku or be capable of only writing in haiku?

This is like asking what part of hell would you like to spend eternity in. I’m not a haiku guy. I’d have to pick the writing one, as sad as that would be for me. I’m not capable of speaking only seventeen syllables at a time.

Would you rather your book become an instant best seller that burns out quickly and is forgotten forever or be met with mediocre criticism but continue to sell well after you’re gone?

Give me mediocre criticism, which I assume also means mediocre success! And to be still selling after I’m gone? Good for my family, so that works for me. Where can I sign up for this mediocrity of which you speak?

Would you rather become a character in your novel or have your characters escape the page and reenact the novel in real life?

I’d rather be a character in my novel, or anyone’s novel, rather than let some of the characters that I create loose in real life. The good guys, okay-fine, no issue, but the bad guys, no, no, no. The stories do have some wonderful moments but they can be disturbing, violent, and at times gruesome, so let’s keep these people on the page only, or on the screen. (The screen. Yes! Having them make it to the screen would work.)

Would you rather have schools teach your book or ban your book?

Teach it. A plausible scenario for that happening? None that I can think of. The language and violent situations that the novel portrays would more likely get it banned.

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Chris Bauer is author of BINGE KILLER (October 2019), HIDING AMONG THE DEAD (a Blessid Trauma thriller), JANE'S BABY, and the horror/thriller SCARS ON THE FACE OF GOD, 2010 EPIC Awards runner-up for best in eBook horror. Look for a new novel in the Blessid Trauma series in 2020. He's also editor of and contributing author to three CRAPPY SHORTS short story collections (SKID MARKS, NUMBER TWO, DEUCES WILD). As a Philly native he's had lengthy stops in Michigan and Connecticut, and he thinks Pittsburgh is a great city even though some of his fictional characters do not. He now lives in Doylestown, PA with his wife and supermutts Rory and Maeby Funke Bauer. He likes the pie more than the turkey. His short fiction has appeared in THUGLIT, SHROUD MAGAZINE, and 100 HORRORS, and he's been podcasted by WELL TOLD TALES. He's a member of International Thriller Writers. Find him at chris@chrisbauerauthor.com, chrisbauerauthor.com, facebook.com/cgbauer, twitter.com/cgbauer, pinterest.com/cntbauer1, instagram.com/cntbauer1. His tagline: "The thing I write will be the thing I write." 

MB Caschetta'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, MB Cashetta shares a deleted scene from her novel Miracle Girls, which released November 11th. Too funny that it's also the booziest scene!

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An extra-dry gin martini on the rocks is the drink. Barely even a drop of Vermouth. This is what 10-year-old Cee-Cee Bianco‘s father drinks. It’s also, coincidentally, what my father drank. The other recurring beverage in Miracle Girls is Benadryl, which Cee-Cee’s family constantly feeds her to take the edge off her visions. In this way, father and daughter are equally stoned throughout the first third of the novel.

The Kirkus review of Miracle Girls points out the basic set up:

In upstate New York, young girls go missing, nuns are revolting, Nixon is resigning, and young Cee-Cee Bianco has visions of the Virgin Mary in this polished debut novel. Ten-year-old Cee-Cee has a broken family: Father Frank goes on drunken benders, mother Glory runs away for weeks at a time, middle brother Roadie is wracked with guilt over his burgeoning homosexuality, and eldest Anthony is a little off. Cee-Cee and Baby Pauly cling to each other, as close as twins.

The scene that got cut during the final edit, in which Frank is in a bar getting sloshed, and Cee-Cee is lying on a pool table drowsy with allergy medicine. Cee-Cee’s mother has taken off again, and Frank has paid the local cabbie to pick his daughter up at home (it is Christmas break) and drop her off at the Blanche’s Iron Door, the bar he frequents. She has a fever:

Frank has Cee-Cee lie down on an empty pool table, bunching up his coat for a pillow. She can see the shiny jukebox, squat and solid with its silver chrome and bright blue lights, behind the mismatched tables and chairs shoved onto the dirty square of plastic flooring. If her head didn’t hurt, she’d get up and use Blanche’s secret stash of quarters.

The bar is empty.  Under Cee-Cee’s limp body, the green felt is comforting.

Frank takes a barstool. “Gin with a splash, Blanche. Extra dry.”

“No kidding.” Blanche takes a wad of bubble gum from Cee-Cee’s mouth and feeds her two baby aspirin, covering her with a red-and-white checkered tablecloth, plastic on one side, fuzzy on the other.

“I feel hot,” Cee-Cee tells her.

“Well ‘course you do, baby,” Blanche says. “That’s why Old Blanche never prays.”

Over Blanche’s pink turtleneck, a red sweater is stretched tight. Near one shoulder, one reindeer says “Ho, Ho, Ho” in white stitching.

“Close your eyes now, bunny.” Blanche smooths her hair. “Don’t go worrying yourself about Jesus, Mary and Joseph. They can take care of themselves.”

            Frank produces a bottle of the magic pink liquid and tosses it to Blanche. “Give her some Benadryl.”

“You can’t just go around drugging your kid,” Blanche says. “And then you wonder why she hallucinates angels and talks to God?”

“It calms her down.” Frank shrugs.

Blanche sighs, gives Cee-Cee a sip from the bottle.

Under the dark beams of the old bank ceiling, Cee-Cee is swimming in and out of a heavy sleep, catching snippets of the conversation.

            “It’s this damn economy…And some new kind of bomb…”

            “Hell of a thing…” Blanche snaps. “A bomb that can drop itself.”

            Cee-Cee kicks off the tablecloth, uncomfortable.

             “I grew up on that base,” Frank is saying.

            “…fancy severance package can’t be all bad.” Blanche comes around from behind the bar and touches Cee-Cee’s forehead, checking the fever.

            Cee-Cee tries to tell Blanche about the names Glory called Frank over Christmas dinner: Whiskey-dick, Asshole, Bum.

            “What’s the matter? Can’t get comfy, kangaroo?” Blanche flicks on the TV. “Try the boob tube for awhile. That always puts old Blanche right to sleep.”

            A trio of violins from a daytime soap opera fills the room. It’s not one Cee-Cee knows. A man with a beard tells a blond woman, “Love will kill you.”

            Frank and Blanche stare at the TV as a newscaster comes on with a special report about the girl missing since Christmas Eve.

            A photograph comes on screen: a girl with wavy red hair, freckles, a gap in her smile where Cee-Cee can see the faintest flash of tongue. The reporter describes the pink sweater the girl was wearing when she disappeared.

            “Sure are a lot of sickos around here,” Frank says.

            Kidnapped, says the newscaster somberly.

            “Shame,” Blanche says. “More girls go missing right here in this part of New York State than anywhere else in the country. Heard it on the radio.”

            “Yeah.” Frank says.

            Next on the T.V., a bunch of Vietnam protesters with long hair shout at the camera. They hold up two-finger peace signs and shake them at the screen.

            A reporter interviews a nun in full habit carrying a protest sign about the war.

            “What’s this?” Frank says. “The Flying Nun? She looks like Sister Bertrille.”

            “Those Sisters from Our Lady of Sorrows are always up to no good,” Blanche says. ““Chaining themselves to the gates of the military base when they’re supposed be teaching long division and catechism. Vietnam protesters. How is that God’s work?”

             “Who do they think is protecting their sacred asses from communism?”

            “Aren’t they friends with Marina? The Sisters of Something-or-Other.”

            Frank can’t stand God or Nonnie. “Glory’s mother is a holy roller.”

At the commercial Blanche lowers the volume and smiles at Cee-Cee. “My Norbie sure is going to be glad to see you lying there like a princess when he gets home.”

The green fuzz beneath Cee-Cee’s body is soft. She falls into a dream about red-haired girls in pink sweaters.

*

As the afternoon wears on, the bar is shrouded in an eerie quiet. Mike hasn’t set foot in a church for years­­, but sometimes the place seems vaguely hallowed to him.

            He lifts his glass: “Amen.”

This moment will soon be ruined by the onslaught of daily drunks and military men from the lab with their briefcases and secrets for a liquid lunch: 9-to-5ers—not his category any more.

Having Cee-Cee nearby makes him feel strange, but also good.

No one prepared him for being a father. He is plagued by the idea that he created four little strangers out of his own body. He thinks the boys look like him, and Cee-Cee is the spitting image of Glory, and therefore of Glory’s mother.

When he and Glory were sweethearts, before they’d even graduated high school, Mike worked in the Caxton Laboratory. It was still called Romeville Labs then. He was the youngest nonenlisted technician in the whole history of the base; younger even than his father was when he first worked there.

After Mike and Glory got married, they moved into a tiny efficiency apartment on the compound. It had a hot plate and a bathtub in the kitchen. When Anthony was born, they upgraded to a family unit. Mike was happy with just the three of them. Things got crowded when Roadie and Baby Pauly came along, but he still somehow managed a pretty good mood.

But nothing was ever good enough for Glory. She accused him of not loving anyone but Anthony. Said he didn’t try hard enough with his other children. Eventually she found the old ramshackle firetrap they live in now. She loved how it was snuggled between two roadways and a creek. Mike thought it was a bad idea.

“The thing with kids,” he tells Blanche, “is that everything ends up being your fault.”

Blanche pours him another drink, fat fingers gripping the glass still steamy from the dishwasher. “I hear Anthony’s in trouble again.”

Mike grunts.

She places the rest of the glasses upside-down on a little shelf behind her. “My Norbert says Anthony will flunk a third time if he doesn’t watch out.”

“What does Fat Norbie know?” Mike hates being reminded that his kids aren’t winners. “He’s got problems of his own.”

“If there's one thing my Norbert knows, it’s flunking. Two birthdays in the eighth grade already; he’s almost 16. Anyway, I enrolled him in that special school, the one with the uniforms and the aides. Starts in January.”

“For Christ’s sake!” Mike is getting drunk now. “Why the hell did you do that?”

“He’s slow upstairs when it comes to thinking.” Blanche stares off toward the window. “Those special programs help.”

“They just need to give a person some space.”

“There’s not that much space in the world.” Blanche chews on a toothpick. “I’m doing something real for Norbert. You should do the same for your kid. They can't spend their lives in high school, now can they?”

The wind howls. Both Mike and Blanche turn to look at the white outside.

 “Maybe if we’d stayed on base,” Mike tells Blanche, slurring, “it wouldn’t have been so easy for the top brass to let me go.”

Glory ended up pregnant with Cee-Cee when they thought she couldn’t possibly conceive again. That’s when all the trouble started. Of course Cee-Cee was a girl, which was more than Mike could handle.

Counting the inventory, Blanche marks down the numbers of bottles in a green ledger. “What’s the matter now?”

Mike lifts his head. “Did I ever tell you about that little intern over at Romeville Free’s gymnasium? Man, was she something.”

“You should leave them young ones alone. “ Blanche sighs. “You told me she stopped taking your calls.”

He chuckles. “The secretary kept saying she was on lunch duty, and I’d say:

‘It’s 3:30! What damn time do these kids eat?’”

Blanche smiles. “She got your number right quick.”

 “I always say the wrong thing to women.”

Cee-Cee feels the gust of cold air, a nervous chill that swirls into the warm bar.

 “I have to hand it to you, Mike,” Blanche clucks her tongue. “You have some lousy luck with the opposite sex.”

Blanche’s points over Mike’s shoulder toward the darkened door where Glory is brushing snow off her coat.

“Oh shit,” Mike says.

Glory’s voice: “How drunk are you, Mike?”

Cee-Cee tries to sit up, but Mike’s pink syrup has her feeling slow.

“I hope you’re not too drunk to hear what I have to say.” Glory says, “Because I’m done with you, Mike. I’m leaving.”

Blanche clinks some bottles together and clears her throat. “I’ll be in the back room, folks; inventory.”

Mike stumbles over to the jukebox, taking the conversation to the far end of the room. Cee-Cee has to strain to make out the words.

 “C’mon, Glory,” Mike pleads. “Give me a break.”

“You’re here all day long instead of looking for work!"

“Down on my luck is all. I can change….turn it around.”

Outside, the wind whips against the building.

Glory’s voice goes soft. “Every person in Oneida County has been laid off from that stupid lab. Who cares? You can get another engineering job. What about Xerox, or even Kodak?  Moonie's been there a long time; he'll help you get a job. Anyway, what kind of work is it anyway? Figuring out better ways to kill people?”

“I need you, Glory.”

“Think about your children,” she says. “What are they supposed to do while you’re throwing everything away?”

Mike cries, not quiet and embarrassed the way most fathers probably cry, but loud with long howling noises coming from his throat.

Cee-Cee tries to roll over, but nothing moves.

Tears muffle Glory’s voice. “You need a shower, Mike.”

Cee-Cee knows that Glory is brushing her fingers through Mike’s hair, a sign that she is about to forgive him. The air shifts again, this time almost imperceptibly, from tense and angry to unbearably sad.

“Look, here’s a twenty. Okay?” Glory says. “Let’s go home, right now. We can call a cab.”

“I’ll get a new job.” Mike sounds happy. “We’ll do Christmas all over again, the right way. Things will get better. Let me buy you a drink: We can toast to second chances.”

“All right, Mike.”

Blanche lugs a carton out of the old bank vault storeroom with its wall of safety deposit boxes, plus the little black gun Blanche always talks about. She keeps it in in the first box on the bottom row. Says she’ll use it if there’s any funny business at her bar.

“I have to step outside for a minute,” Glory says. “Let go of my coat, Mike. Just one minute. I have to take care of something. Then I’ll be back, and Blanche will call a cab, and we’ll all go home.”

“Hurry,” Mike says.

Glory comes over to Cee-Cee on the pool table and gives her a big hug with plenty of kisses.  “Hi, Baby. Are you sick again? I’m sorry about this morning. But now we’ll all go home together, okay?”

Like magic, Cee-Cee’s eyelids unstick. “Hi, Glory. I feel better now.”

“Back in a flash,” Glory promises as she breezes back toward the door.

Blanche crosses the room, stopping to peer through the diamond cutout window of the front door after Glory; she holds a few bottles of whiskey in her hand.

Mike starts talking as if nothing happened. “Damndest thing, Blanche, I had to pee like the devil for the last half hour. And now–––nothing!”

Blanche snorts.

“Poor me, poor me.” He slaps Roadie’s money on the bar. “Pour me a drink!”

Blanche comes around the backside of the bar with a bottle of Beefeater. She collects Mike’s money and fills his glass.

Mike works his mouth into a dry smile.

“Glory gone?” Blanche pours to the rim.

Mike bares his teeth at the whiskey. “Gone is exactly what Glory is.”

*

It gets dark a few minutes before the dinnertime rush. Blanche opens the back door to let her son in. 

Norbie walks fast on the heels of a girl with ponytails and scraped knees. He pulls off his coat and scarf, giving his mother a kiss, then looks across the room. “Cee-Cee! Have you been here praying?”

“I’m sick.”

His looming rubbery face is red from the cold and big as a moon.

“Oh no!” He curls his long pink tongue and rubs his hands together in a special coded motion above his head, as if applying some magic lotion. “This is my best friend, Mary Margaret. She’s real smart. Aren’t you, Mary Margaret? She lives five houses over.”

The girl eyes Cee-Cee’s pajamas and hair. “You’ve been lying there all day? On a pool table?”

Feeling her fever lift, Cee-Cee pops up on an elbow. “Yeah, so?”

“What if someone wanted to play and knocked you off with a cue stick?”

“Hasn’t happened yet,” she says.

Norbert exhales a long, sour breath. “The angels watch over Cee-Cee.”

Mary Margaret twists her cherry mouth into a frown. “What’s that mean?”

But Cee-Cee is not about to tell her anything. She just smiles.

Mary Margaret is skinny and has two jagged front teeth growing in crooked. Her face is small and mouse-like, sharp but pretty, and splattered with freckles. Her brown hair is tied into matching braids behind each ear.

“What grade are you in?” she asks. “Second?”

“Fourth,” Cee-Cee says. “They almost skipped me to Fifth but I wanted to stay with my brother.”

“Public school?”

Cee-Cee nods.

Norbert watches them. “Mary Margaret goes to Catholic school with the nuns from church.”

“My Nonnie lives across from Our Lady,” Cee-Cee says. “She’s friends with the Mother Superior there.”

“Mother Stephen!” Mary Margaret seems vaguely impressed. “She’s the school principal. Do you know she has burns on most of her body? If you get on her good side, she’ll show you the scars—they’re real bad.”

Nonnie has Mother Stephen over for tea and cookies when Cee-Cee and her brothers are visiting, but she has never seen any scars. “I think she’s pretty.”

“Her face, sure, and she's younger than most of them.” Mary Margaret turns to Norbert. “You know what those Sisters are called, don’t you?”

Norbert’s eyes get big. “The Sisters of Christ’s Most Precious Wounds?”

“The Spooky Sisters!” Mary Margaret says. “And I’ll tell you what: they are a big pain in my ass.”

Laughing, Norbert lumbers to the bar to pat Mike’s back, as if he’s the genius responsible for all his good luck. “Cee-Cee’s here! I love Cee-Cee.”

“She’s our girl.” Mike raises his glass.

Mary Margaret studies Cee-Cee. “Next year, I’m going to get a pair of platform shoes and wear them at school. Let those holy Wounds try and stop me!”

“Glory twisted her ankle wearing platforms once. She had to rest her foot in a bucket of ice.”

“So?” Mary Margaret says. Then, curious: “Who’s Glory?”

Blanche signals to them. “Dinner upstairs—then I’ll take you girls home. Mike’s in no shape to do anything except sleep it off in the store room.”

Blanche never lets children sleep over, but she will feed just about anyone.

A house on two main highways and a creek that floods every year is her idea of bad news, she always says—and she doesn’t like boys running around like wild Indians, either. She doesn’t let Norbert go to Cee-Cee’s house too often.

Dragging his bad leg, Norbert makes a path through the crowd toward the arched doorway behind the bar that leads to the little apartment above. The Iron Door is alive with customers and music as the afternoon lull draws to a close.

“One of you lesser drunks watch the bar for me.” Blanche tucks the cash box under her arm. “I’ve got to feed these kids.”

“Unwise calling your customers drunks,” Mike says.

“Nah.” Blanche looks around. “You know I think of you as folks with cancer, sorry cases, except some of you still got hair.”

Laughter ripples through the room. It is always cheerful at the beginning of a shift. But these are the very same men, Cee-Cee knows, who will be hunched and silent at the end of the night.

One guy comes around to the back of the bar. “You love us, Blanche. You know you do.”

Blanche leans into the guy. “Pretend to care, my husband always said, may he rest. That’s all people want. And that’s what I do: pretend.”

The guy pushes a dollar bill into Blanche’s psychedelic sweater. “Damn good bartender, your husband was.”

Blanche slaps the guy’s hand away, but pinches the dollar. “What’s this for?”

“For your kid. Because he’s…simple –– or something.”

“Oh, he’s something all right.” She beams.

Blanche herds them up the stairs to the cramped apartment above. “The first rule of alcohol is never get close; you’ll only get hurt.” She nods at Cee-Cee and Mary Margaret. “The second is: never try to fill up a drunk; it can’t be done.”

Holding Norbert’s damp meaty hand, Cee-Cee watches the mole at the corner of Blanche’s mouth disappear and reappear as she talks. She knows what Blanche means: Most of the time, Mike is as hollow as a drum.

Norbert pulls both Cee-Cee’s and Mary Margaret’s hand to his chest, rubbing them together. Blanche stoops, weighed down by her enormous body.

“Can Mary Margaret eat over too?” Norbert asks. He stops on the landing, dropping their hands, so he can rub his knuckles together in the strange familiar motion at his forehead.

“Don’t see why not.” Blanche heaves her body up the steps. “‘Less Mary Margaret’s mother is making dinner at her home?”

“Mom’s got a new baby,” Mary Margaret reports. “No dinners for a while.”

“Dear heavens, another one?” Blanche squeezes by to unlock the apartment door. “Where does that woman get the heart?”

Mary Margaret shrugs. “She stays in her room.”

“You must be a comfort to her.”

“I’m the only one who’s made it so far,” Mary Margaret says. “We’re not even naming this baby until we’re sure he's going to live."

She looks at Cee-Cee meaningfully.

In a flash, Cee-Cee sees the little baby graveyard behind Mary Margaret's house, matchstick stones rising up to mark the graves. She counts: one, two, three, four of them.

Blanche pats Mary Margaret’s bony arm, then caresses Norbert’s cheek until he unfurls his long pink flag of a tongue and wags it outside his mouth.

“Well, I hope you like soup, Mary Margaret, because we’ve got to get our little Cee-Cee here back on her feet.”

“Okay by me,” Mary Margaret says.

Norbert rests his big moony face on his mother’s breast, making Cee-Cee’s heartache exactly in the middle.

In Blanche’s apartment, they turn on the lights, start a fire in the stove, and open several cans of soup. Blanche parks Cee-Cee on the sofa with an afghan and flips on the local news.

On a tiny black and white set that looks like it was made for a doll, the newscaster gives an update on the kidnapping. A piece of pink sweater was found on a chain link fence down by the railroad tracks.

The missing girl’s name is Eileena Brice Iaccamo.

Blanche clucks her tongue. “Don’t those Iaccamo kids go to Catholic school with you at Queen of Sorrows, Mary Margaret?”

“A bunch do,” Mary Margaret answers. “There’s about a million of them, all with Irish first and middle names. The older ones go to public school at Romeville Free.”

“Missing girl’s 14, the paper says. She must be up at the high school.”

Mary Margaret hovers close by, waiting for Cee-Cee to look up from the T.V. “Last year this girl in my neighborhood disappeared. In the spring, they found the snow piled up right over a set of fresh bones. Turned out to be a dead dog though. She was never heard from again.”

Cee-Cee chews a fresh piece of gum.

Mary Margaret watches for signs of weakness and comes up with a lie: “She was my best friend.”

Norbert chants in a loud voice: “They have to find this missing girl. They have to find her.”

Cee-Cee can see someone pulling a girl out of a ditch. “Jesus brought St. Martha’s brother back to life. Maybe you should pray for her.”

Mary Margaret bites her nails and frowns. “You don’t believe that crap.”

“Why not?” Cee-Cee says.

Mary Margaret thinks this over. “We could be best friends. You’d have to wear my neckerchief and call me on the phone.”

“How would I get your number?”

 Mary Margaret pulls a pen out of her bag and writes her phone number on Cee-Cee’s hand.

The anchorman’s confident tone agitates Norbert. He crosses the room, thighs rubbing together in his gigantic green corduroy pants. He stands near the TV and shifts his weight from good leg to bad leg.

Blanche watches her son as she stirs the soup. He will be okay because he is giant and almost already a man. “Remember, girls, it’s just as unsafe in some houses as it is outside them.”

 “Do you think they’ll ever find this kid, Missus?” Mary Margaret asks.

Though the pale sun is almost entirely burned out in the winter sky, Cee-Cee feels it blaze in her heart when Mary Margaret turns and smiles.

 “Don’t worry, baby.” Blanch say. “They find everyone sooner or later.”

MB Caschetta is the recipient of a W.K. Rose Fellowship for Emerging Artists, a Sherwood Anderson Foundation Writing Award, and a Seattle Review Fiction Prize, among other honors. Her work has appeared in the Mississippi Review, Del Sol Review, 3:AM Magazine, New York Times, and Chronicle of Higher Education, among other literary journals and media outlets. These days you can occasionally find her drinking a gluten-free beer, waiting for the day when sorghum will taste as good as hops, but she doesn't hold out much hope. Mostly she drinks tea. Miracle Girls is her first novel.