Here's the beginning of "Fire," the first story in my new collection of linked short stories, "House Stories," just published by Adelaide Books:
"Somehow Kirby and I end up alone in the house. It doesn't happen very often because six of us have been sharing this house for over a year, and guests, lovers, and other visitors frequently swell the population. But tonight everyone else has been recruited by Mirabai, official house friend of long standing, for a road trip to her favorite childhood beach on Long Island. Kirby, who passes on the trip because he has 'business' to take care of, mixes some pleasure into that business and fills the summer night with a crew of friends and potential customers (is there a difference?) invited to sample a recent shipment of THC pills. This turns into the kind of night that ends up with guys flopping on the living room floor, threatening to stumble around in the morning as well unless somebody eases them out the door, shrewdly deputizing the most responsible party still standing (or yawning) to drive them home... "
And that's before the fire gets going.
"House Stories" tells the story of an eventful summer in the lives of a group of young people sharing a house in the Connecticut countryside circa 1970, a period of rapid cultural transformation resembling in its upheavals what American society is going through today.
The book's first-person narrator, Jon Russell, is a recent college graduate recovering from his first, largely disastrous year as a high school English teacher. He is also looking back at his brief, too-young marriage to his high school sweetheart, which ended in divorce. While Russell is delighted at the prospect of a free summer, his world is rocked by the discovery that his eighteen-year-old girl friend is a heroin addict and has been stealing money from the house.
Rapid mood swings -- Russell's delight in his newly discovered freedom; and guilt over his failure to realize that Linnie, a former student at the school where he taught, has fallen into a dark place -- characterize all these stories. His housemates include an ex-GI drug dealer; a preppy who can't finish that last paper required to graduate from college; an aspiring artist facing the necessity of becoming a teacher at his former high school; a graduate school dropout seeking to bring her New Age food philosophy into a household of men; and a talented Ivy League music major stuck in a boring summer job.
Liberated from coffee, nicotine, animal food, and other crutches -- while increasingly prone to exploring the next psychedelic to hit the market -- Jon Russell 'says yes to life,' feels cosmically energized, reads Walt Whitman amid his own 'leaves of grass,' and sees paradise in a grain of sand. He is also determined to save his teenaged girl friend from the clutches of heroin.
What could possibly go wrong?
The book is available from Adelaide Books. And also from Amazon.
You can check it out at either of these links Adelaide Books
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