by Steve Pfarrer
BROKEN LINES
By Tom Pappalardo
Valley cartoonist, graphic designer and guitarist Tom Pappalardo has recently turned his creative energies to writing — his 2017 book “One More Cup of Coffee” is a snarky, part-diary/part-review of local coffee shops in which he recorded some great bits of overheard conversation from other customers.
In “Broken Lines,” Pappalardo offers what he calls an “illustrated novel,” a rambling, shaggy-dog tale involving cowboys, a spaceman, vampires, pyromaniac firemen and a road trip with bad coffee.
It’s a story shot full with Pappalardo’s black and white illustrations, odd graphics and some droll footnotes, such as one about how to avoid being targeted by police radar guns (“sing a A# as loud as you can”).
The narrative begins in an all-night diner, where Maggie, a tired waitress, serves a cowboy and a man in a spacesuit who are bickering through their meal. She urges them to calm down; a little later, they give her a ride home to her trailer park when her car won’t start.
Then some demons show up at Maggie’s trailer, dressed like firemen. “Firefighters put out fires and save people,” they tell her. “We’re firemen. We’re here to burn and kill.” Amid the destruction, the cowboy and spaceman rescue Maggie, and the three take off in the cowboy’s van, along with a silent vampire.
The story defies easy categorization. It’s part a takeoff of horror movie characters — the vampire has given up drinking blood and isn’t sure what to take in its place — and part spoof of the American road trip, as the adventurers must deal with all manner of bland landscapes and generic highway food like coffee and donuts.
Pappalardo even works himself into the story at one point, imagining he meets his characters in a mall food court, where he attempts to explain to them what he’s doing, only to feel the effort is falling flat.
“ ‘It wasn’t supposed to happen like this,’ I sigh to myself. I slouch in the spine-destroying metal chair and wait for this painful chapter of my life to end.”
Where is this story going? As publisher notes put it, “Vigilantes, bureaucracy, and pure evil conspire against our heroes, pursuing them … through a mall parking lot, and all the way down to the bottom of a bottomless pit in the lower intestines of Hell. Will Maggie find her way back home again? Does she even want to?”
CONVERSATION ABOUT AMERICA
By Thomas I. White
Desiderius Press
conversationaboutamerica.com
As Thomas White sees it, the election of Donald Trump as president was not a fluke or an aberration: Rather it was a direct result of the Republican party having long been hijacked by extreme right-wing elements that reject fundamental ethical values.
In his newest book, White, who teaches philosophy and economics at Mount Holyoke College, tackles this subject through an imaginary conversation between a potential political donor and a generic Republican congressman.
White, who’s also a professor of business ethics at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, uses the congressman as a first-person narrator who finds himself knocked off balance by the questions of the potential donor.
The donor, named Abe, bit by bit takes the congressman to task for the actions of his party: its stonewalling for eight years of former President Barack Obama; its rejection of a near-consensus by scientists that the earth is warming; its advancement of economic policies that aid the rich; its silence on Trump’s assault on ethics.
White stresses that his book is about ethics, not politics, and notes that its message may have particular relevance for disenchanted Republicans who, with Trump as president, are asking “What happened to my party?” and are wondering how the group that produced Abraham Lincoln can rediscover its values.
As Abe says to the congressman, “We’re looking to advance American values, not Republican values, Democratic values, conservative values or liberal values. We’re looking for patriots, not partisans, who recognize that an attack on fundamental ideas of right, wrong, honest, decency and respect is an assault on the country.”
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.