SLIDER
I have just finished uploading the final draft of my novel, Slider. If you're so kind as to read it, please offer me your comments via tags, or if preferred, email to eddiehchrist@gmail.com.
Below is the blurb I've prepared in my query letters:
“Slider” is a psychological thriller that explores the self-injury unrestrained selfishness inflicts. Ralph Ebe has always been a bon vivant and epicurean because he could. He has an extra convolution in his brain that allows him to shift to another existence where things go better for him. He merely “slides” from one version of reality to another until, for instance, the dice come up 7, or the girl he is lusting after loses that correctable, unsightly nose tip. Although he is selfish, he is likable, because he has been given a gift most of us would use the same exact way, following the paths of least resistance and the way to the most rewards in life. Ultimately, he progresses into worlds that are made a little worse each time because of the self-serving choices he has made. Like a rogue wave, the selfish small perturbations in fate he engenders gather until he finds himself in very unattractive places—a world where it took three atomic bombs to end World War II, where the South won the Civil War, or where hospitals do more harm than good. As he realizes his direction has become calamitous, elements of altruism start to creep into his journey. His pregnant girlfriend, Ava, gives him his first taste of putting himself second, but by then it is too late: he is being pushed further into the labyrinth of selfishness, powerless to manage the direction himself. The innocent Ava is trapped in his wake, making his struggle to undo the harm and get back to a reasonable world—home, where things don’t always go our way—so urgent.
As Ralph Ebe has an anatomical anomaly in his brain that allows him his sliding capabilities, is it really so different from each of us having a civilized part of our brain exerting authority over the primitive self-serving part? Each of us has his or her own threshold where that dividing line exists, but that dividing line is often blurred. When does the altruistic man overcome the caveman? Homo sapiens outvote the reptile? Human beings are complex, civilization and the rules of societal behavior hiding our reptilian thoughts so well. This ugly struggle continues in each of us, often privately taking us aback when we realize what thoughts so easily appear in our deeper brains. We are all both protagonists and antagonists in our own stories, as Ralph Ebe demonstrates for sympathetic readers in this cautionary tale. “Slider” is a psychological thriller and sophisticated horror story that adventures deep into the mental landscape of self-indulgence where karma is delivered without mercy.