A novel about bullying: Read how the diary of a sex slave spawns a crusade to civilize the last feudal outpost in the Western world. Here is my story:
One day a body washes up in the river carrying a book that exposes a century-old lie. The workers on a tobacco plantation learn they are slaves and that there’s a world beyond the wall where power is measured not by the size of their bombs but by the strength of their moral superiority. Elma Hanasy steals a page from the book and is born again as Marilyn Pope. She initiates a grand scheme to bring health and safety, caring and sharing to the village of Thades.
But Ned Pullman is an old-fashioned man with nothing to lose. After years of living on the verge of starvation, he finds himself backed into a corner and explodes in a fit of senseless violence. He murders the bailiff and triggers an old-style revolution—full of bloodshed and tears.
As the revolution exhausts itself, the pendulum of human appetites swings the other way again. Marilyn gets fifty-one per cent of the vote and ushers in a brave new world with every possible safeguard against violence and inequality. Ned loses everything and learns the hard way that membership in society is a treasure to be coveted. He joins a band of outcasts to rob the trade wagon but encounters a devil from the past and instead ends up joining a cult that possesses a secret cure for what ails humankind.
But if you think that that is all there is, my friends….
Buddha’s Cross is a novel questioning where we are taking our modern democracy and how to save it by looking inward. The non-fiction book, The Chocolate Party Manifesto, was originally written as the final chapter of the novel. Buddha’s Cross started out in the early 1980’s as a book on non-verbal communication (body language, NLP, etc.), and became a novel about brainwashing, cults and evangelism. In the early 2000’s, the movie, The Village came out, so I shelved my book for ten years thinking there was no market for two stories about a village cut off from the world. Rough drafts of several novels ensued, which I cast aside as well, followed by The Chocolate Party Manifesto.
Buddha’s Cross presents a number of angry points of view—male and female, corporatist and communist—the disparate strands of a healthy mixed society. The characters demolish their old world and then come together at the end to rebuild it on a brand-new set of principles. The title Buddha’s Cross refers to icons of two very different religions as well as to the physical Buddhist cross. The figurative meaning refers to the human body and its endlessly swinging appetites as a cross we bear that gets in the way of Buddhist-style attainment of nirvana or perfection. If you’ve already read Buddha’s Cross and don’t like it, read The Chocolate Party Manifesto. It will double your anger or rid you of it completely. And then there’s The Human Charter to add just a little more blush to your cheeks.
In 2017, I self-published The Chocolate Party Manifesto. It was meant to be the final chapter of my novel, Buddha’s Cross, also self-published in 2017, but the Manifesto is non-fiction and works better as a separate book. If you can suspend disbelief for a moment, the Manifesto contains recipes for a personal, social, economic and political renaissance—a rebirth of our Western society, no less. It is full of enticements to the left, the right and the middle. In fact, it trashes the old paradigm of left and right—labeled now as the Purple Party—and replaces it with a new one. Hell, it even contains a set of commandments to live by called the Human Charter. The Human Charter continues the theme of bullying from the novel and the manifesto and presents a formula and a series of actions to patch up our Western democracies, or at least make them more representative of all our citizens.
