“A dark comedy about the psychological damage inflicted on American workers during the difficult economic and political climate in the new millennium.”
Living in fear to stay employed inspired Fearkiller (Volume 1). A sick culture that enriched a few at the expense of everyone else, income inequality—yeah, you know what I’m talking about.
I got to thinking about this energy and the world since.
In late 2012, when I released my dark comedy, my newbie-indie-author mind could not have fathomed that the following events were going to happen:
• The Flint Water Crisis. The greedy interests that caused this crisis have not paid the price.
• Rich white people bought the Supreme Court, starting with the theft of Merrick Garland’s seat.
• We elect a President who called himself “smart” for not paying taxes. (Oh, he did and said tons of other shitty things, too.) Now he’s up for reelection because rich people want more tax breaks for themselves, on top of his earlier ones for them that hiked the deficit and did not help the country.
• Covid-19. The wealthy used a pandemic to line their own pockets.
• January 6th, 2021. A character from my book, Egan, he would have been at the Capitol that day, his dumb ass thinking Donald Trump would bail him out of jail. Our country’s slow-walk of justice fits with what made me want to write Fearkiller.
• Wall Street ruining the housing market. Chiseling rent money out of working-class folks is way Fearkiller.
• Big Tech seems less democratic than the techbros were twelve years ago. Surveillance capitalism seems to be their form of capitalism. The fact that Fintech white-collar criminals control gambling now instead of organized crime—that fact itself screams, “America: we have a problem.”
• The Fyre Festival. While not a deadly event, metaphorically, it says so much.
• Layoffs have become more frequent than the crazed setting of my story, the 2000s. Layoffs are a major part of the plot.
• Price-gouging packaged as “inflation.” Yeah, fuck those guys. The cat is out of the bag. They are nickling-and-diming the masses to death. Literally.
These events/happenings all make me think of my story. But not in a good way.
You know that “truth is stranger than fiction” mumbo-jumbo? It’s not mumbo-jumbo. It’s truth.
Give my book’s opener a read at Amazon. Pretty please. If you’ve been laid off or stressed over the possibility of losing your job, you might like Fearkiller (Volume 1). I won’t pitch Notes from Trillionaire Island: Fearkiller (Volume 2) or my sci-fi story, Revolutionizer Alpha. That’s up to the first book.
And get ready to vote. Democracy. #taxtherich
Earlier posts:
• Such an evocative meme.
• The Donald Trump Tax.
• The 1% pay enough in taxes to start wars, but not enough to finish them.
• Open letter to a picture of myself back in cubicle life, 2003-ish.
I also post at Medium.
Chris Maley 