Brian Lush's Blog
September 23, 2022
NEW NATIVE AUTHOR'S DEBUT NOVEL, ROGER'S WAR, IS A HAUNTING TALE OF SURVIVAL IN A DYSTOPIAN NIGHTMARE
With a war between Russia and Ukraine and a lull in a global pandemic, who wants to get lost in a tale of a world gone mad? It wasn't exactly the kind of territory that writer Brian Lush wanted to mine in what would become his first novel, Roger's War (Rockwired Media LLC).
“This was where the muse led me,” says Lush whose debut novel, Roger's War, has recently been made available on Kindle and paperback through Amazon. According to Lush, the roots of his dystopian coming-of-age story stemmed from the nightmarish events of the 2018 Stoneman Douglas High School shootings and former President Donald Trump's belief that teachers should be armed. “It was pretty wild to imagine high school teachers being armed and yielding that kind of control over kids. Children! Back then, I thought I had at least a short story on my hands. However, life got in the way and I had other commitments and the story never saw the light of day. From there, the idea was in the back of my head and then snowballed, especially after the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and the pandemic, and then this little story I had in my head about the abuse of power became this huge novel on how one young boy survives under such abuse of power.”
Roger's War is a tense and frantic narrative that illustrates the life of a young man coming of age in a frightfully repressed society. The country once known as the United States of America has descended into a second civil war. Emerging from the devastation is a rogue nation called Heartland – a totalitarian theocracy under the rule of a maniacal, self-proclaimed prophet known simply as Father and his lethal military. Plucked from the ashes of a war-torn America is a half-Native/half black fourteen-year-old named Roger Bretagne. After losing his family to Heartland’s devastating blitzkrieg, Roger is rounded up and matriculated into this stark, repressed and dangerous new world. His new parents are powerful predators, the quiet country town he lives in is an oppressive hamlet gripped by fear and his school – under the control of the beastly schoolmaster Brother Isaac – emphasizes brutal indoctrination. Somehow, sanity must prevail. In cautiously navigating the rocky road of this toxic milieu, Roger finds love, allies and a burgeoning resistance movement hellbent on destroying Heartland and building a glorious future. Whatever that entails.
The book's narrator, Roger Bretagne, is not a first when it comes to first-person narratives that take place in worlds gone mad, but his half-Sioux/half-black lineage is a definite first in Native American fiction. “[Roger] is a character that was very unexpected to me in writing this book. There were a lot of surprises in the writing of this book, but the character of Roger felt like a revelation. While I made great pains to create a character and not put myself or anyone I loved in a fascist society, I feel like I ended up putting myself there. The character Roger was more than just a window into this world. We share the same heritage. It feels like I've got skin in the game.”
Roger's War is available on Kindle and paperback through Amazon.com.
“This was where the muse led me,” says Lush whose debut novel, Roger's War, has recently been made available on Kindle and paperback through Amazon. According to Lush, the roots of his dystopian coming-of-age story stemmed from the nightmarish events of the 2018 Stoneman Douglas High School shootings and former President Donald Trump's belief that teachers should be armed. “It was pretty wild to imagine high school teachers being armed and yielding that kind of control over kids. Children! Back then, I thought I had at least a short story on my hands. However, life got in the way and I had other commitments and the story never saw the light of day. From there, the idea was in the back of my head and then snowballed, especially after the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and the pandemic, and then this little story I had in my head about the abuse of power became this huge novel on how one young boy survives under such abuse of power.”
Roger's War is a tense and frantic narrative that illustrates the life of a young man coming of age in a frightfully repressed society. The country once known as the United States of America has descended into a second civil war. Emerging from the devastation is a rogue nation called Heartland – a totalitarian theocracy under the rule of a maniacal, self-proclaimed prophet known simply as Father and his lethal military. Plucked from the ashes of a war-torn America is a half-Native/half black fourteen-year-old named Roger Bretagne. After losing his family to Heartland’s devastating blitzkrieg, Roger is rounded up and matriculated into this stark, repressed and dangerous new world. His new parents are powerful predators, the quiet country town he lives in is an oppressive hamlet gripped by fear and his school – under the control of the beastly schoolmaster Brother Isaac – emphasizes brutal indoctrination. Somehow, sanity must prevail. In cautiously navigating the rocky road of this toxic milieu, Roger finds love, allies and a burgeoning resistance movement hellbent on destroying Heartland and building a glorious future. Whatever that entails.
The book's narrator, Roger Bretagne, is not a first when it comes to first-person narratives that take place in worlds gone mad, but his half-Sioux/half-black lineage is a definite first in Native American fiction. “[Roger] is a character that was very unexpected to me in writing this book. There were a lot of surprises in the writing of this book, but the character of Roger felt like a revelation. While I made great pains to create a character and not put myself or anyone I loved in a fascist society, I feel like I ended up putting myself there. The character Roger was more than just a window into this world. We share the same heritage. It feels like I've got skin in the game.”
Roger's War is available on Kindle and paperback through Amazon.com.
