JeffreyKeeten

”The native calls the baobab ‘the devil tree’ because he claims that the devil, getting tangled in its branches, punished the tree by reversing it. To the native, the roots are branches now, and the branches are roots. To ensure that there would be no more baobabs, the devil destroyed all the young ones. That’s why, the native says, there are only full-grown baobab trees left.”



Jonathan James Whalen is caught up in the roots of his life. The ghosts of his parents, the snares of his wealth, the pursuit to feel something through drugs, sex, and therapy, and absolutely no idea of what to do with his life are all keeping him trapped in the same place regardless of where he is geographically. He travels around Africa, finds himself in exotic brothels, and moves from woman to woman looking for some kind of fulfillment from the world around him. The issue of course is the same for anyone: regardless of where you are, you are still you.

“A kind of annihilation, was what Serena called their coupling, and though Pemberton would never have thought to describe it that way, he knew her words had named the thing exactly.”


Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence play the power couple in the 2015 movie.

”Life's generally artless ... but it does get these occasional hard-ons for plot. It connects things, nefariously, behind your back, and before you know it you're in the final act of a lousy movie.”



Talulla is eight months pregnant, on the run from an organization called World Organisation for the Control of Occult Phenomena (WOCOP), and trying to stay under the radar of a nest of vampires. Yes, vampires, which would be weird enough, but what makes things even weirder is:

Talulla is something special, something rather wild.

***4.5 stars out of 5***

“The Mississippi Delta is not always dark with rain. Some autumn mornings, the sun rises over Moon Lake, or Eagle, or Choctaw, or Blue, or Roebuck, all the wide, deep waters of the state, and when it does, its dawn is as rosy with promise and hope as any other.”


Scene of the original Wolf Whistle that inspired this novel.

It is sometimes hard to comprehend such racism, such hate existing in a place capable of so much beauty. I would like to think that the allure of the natural world would dissolve the barbed wire from around the hearts of those so intent on holding onto archaic intolerance. This story is set in 1955, and maybe we are now in the present day further along towards realizing Dr. Martin King’s fervent hope: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

”Truthfully, I don’t think murder is necessarily as bad as people make it out to be. Everyone dies. What difference does it make if a few bad apples get pushed along a little sooner than God intended? And your wife, for example, seems like the kind worth killing.”

We are brought up to believe that murdering someone is the worst thing we could ever do, but is it? If a person is leaving a wide wake of broken hearts and battered spirits and in some cases much, much worse, is it really the worst thing we can do for all of humanity to give that person a nudge towards the afterlife? Of course the question remains, are any of us capable by ourselves of being the defense, the jury, the prosecution, and ultimately the judge?

When Ted Severson sees Brad Daggett, a man he has been paying an abundant amount of money to build his dream house, bend his wife, Miranda, over a table and have consensual sex with her, it sets off a string of events that...leads...to...murder.

At the very least Brad should have offered Ted a discount.

Bung, bung, bung, bung, bung
Bung, bung, bung, bung, bung
Bung, bung, bung, bung, bung
Bung, bung, bung, bung, bung
Bung, bung, bung, bung, bung

Mr. Sandman, bring me a dream
(Bung, bung, bung, bung)

Make him the cutest that I've ever seen
(Bung, bung, bung, bung)

Give him two lips like roses and clover
(Bung, bung, bung, bung)

Then tell him that his lonesome nights are over

Sandman, I'm so alone
Don't have nobody to call my own
Please turn on your magic beam
Mr. Sandman, bring me a dream
Bung, bung, bung, bung

Whirrr whap whap tic tic tic screeeeech!

STOP THE RECORD!!!

Sandman Slim…….. ain’t that kind of Sandman.

*****BEFORE WAYWARD PINES THERE WAS DESERT PLACES*****

”What did Keats say? It’s beauty. Not just pretty truth. We have black hearts, but they’re beautiful.”

When Andrew Z. Thomas receives a bizarre letter in his mailbox explaining that there is a dead girl buried on his property, soaked in his blood, he at first thinks it is a prank being perpetrated by one of his fans. He is a horror writer and used to receiving...unusual...letters, but this one was different. After several stages of smirking at the audacity and shivering at the thought that it may be true, he finally grabs a shovel and follows the directions to the spot where the body is supposed to be.

”There were dark blue hollows beneath his eyes, his lips were gray and slack, and the cheap brown suit he wore was blotched with mud and mildew. The front of his white linen shirt and his tattered black ascot was dappled with sherry stains; his frayed cuffs shot out of the coat like a poor schoolboy’s. He radiated the heat of fever, and as he shivered in a sudden chill he lay down his pen and put a trembling hand to his brow; his dark hair was damp with sweat, and tiny beads of moisture in his thin dark mustache glinted with yellow lamplight. Poe gave a deep, rattling cough. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘I’ve been ill.’”



When Edgar Allan Poe conceived the Usher Malady, in his famous short story, I do wonder if he wasn’t describing an affliction that he himself had suffered from in some form or fashion. When I read of him, he is never vigorous but always on the point of collapse. Though his body may be wracked with fever or with cold sweats, there is little doubt that any blight he is suffering from originates from the melancholy that hangs like a foggy curtain in all the corners of his mind.

”Either erase the story , or we’ll erase you. And maybe your family. But we’ll do them first, so you learn your lesson before you die.”

Jake Adelstein went to Japan at the tender age of nineteen. One beautiful thing about being nineteen is it still feels like anything is possible. I remember those heady days well, when failure was a foreign word and those bumps in the road were not anything to get stressed about. On the inside cover of the book, it said that Adelstein had gone to Japan “in search of peace and tranquility”. He could have stayed home and joined the Hermitage in Big Sur if that was what he really wanted. No, what Jake wanted was excitement and he got it in spades.

”It’s hard to think when you can’t breathe. It’s even harder to think when you can’t breathe because a yakuza bruiser has you pinned against the wall, with one hand around your neck and the other hand punching your ribs, and your feet are dangling off the floor.”

“Remember that we expect from you conduct of a quite different order from that of the mass of mankind. Your purpose - to escape the bondage of time, to obtain mastery over yourselves, and thus over your environment - must never waver... This discipline has one aim, the acquisition of power, and by power freedom.”

The Vice-Marshall of The Aerodrome was quite the pontificating bastard. He was always ready with a few words of disdain for the way things have been done, and always willing to share his opinions about how things should be done. He despises tradition because it keeps people from mindlessly following his version of the NEW ORDER.

You see, this is a fable about Fascism.

"There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher?"


A gothic house that instantly made me think of the House of Usher.

“No utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time. As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become discontented with power and possessions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams. And even when the external world has granted all it can, there still remain the searchings of the mind and the longings of the heart.”



The United States and the Soviet Union were in the midst of a military space race when large ships appeared in the skies over all the major cities. The aliens have come to keep humans from annihilating themselves.

An act of altruism? Or do they have another agenda?

”Everything he sees speaks tulip to him. Comely women are tulips; their skirts are petals, swinging around the pollen-dusted stigmas of their legs.”

The first photo of flight snapped by a man who was taking his first picture ever. The Wright brothers were very careful to document each stage of their development not only with photography, but also with journals.


”The best dividends on the labor invested have invariably come from seeking more knowledge rather than more power.” Wilbur and Orville Wright

They were brothers.

”I just wanted to get away from it, the curse that Oxtail had cast upon everyone who lived there. That was where the guilt lay, with the town, with the collective consciousness that twisted and bent and spoiled and soured the people who had grown up with it, breathing its vapors. But they don’t put towns in jail. They probably should, but they don’t.”

John Marshall Tanner has been asked to investigate the celebrity reporter Roland Nelson by his rather attractive wife. Private eyes love it when good looking women come into their office needing the kind of help only they can provide. Marsh is no exception, except he has been around the block long enough to know better than to have his head turned by a few curves and a pair of nicely turned calves.

”It does also happen that one evening, because of someone’s attentive gaze, you feel a need to communicate to him not your experience, but quite simply some of the various details connected by an invisible thread, a thread which is in danger of breaking and which is called the course of life.”

Jean B. is in the wrong place at the wrong time, or maybe it is the right place at the right time. He chases the ghosts of lost explorers for a living so he is used to going to places much more uncomfortable than Milan in August. The shops have closed down. The hotel is barren of guests, but the staff is still talking about he Parisian woman who came to Milan in the heat of the summer and killed herself.