Richard Dooling's Blog

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Send The Dead: A Novella and Four Stories

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The Acolyte: A Novel

It’s almost ready. Jacket art soon. My hero is an altar boy who must help a federal prosecutor and the FBI bust a Catholic priest's child exploitation ring.

The New York Times called my third novel, Brain Storm, a thinking man’s John Grisham thriller, an overused label to be sure. But I do think that if you liked Brain Storm, about a lawyer appointed to defend a brain-damaged white supremacist, The Acolyte will offer the same mix of law, satire, and a good story.

Kahtoola Exospikes

I do not aspire to being an influencer, but now and again I do have an impulse to recommend something besides books and movies.

For the last ten years I’ve been living in the mountains of Montana, which means I am usually walking either uphill or downhill. During the winter months, that often means walking up and down on solid ice. If you are anywhere close to my age (almost 72), one fall on ice can end your career as a hiker. Even back in the Nebraska flatlands, I wore Yaktrax or several other similar cleats when going for a walk or a run on snow or ice. Alas, these traction cleats all seemed to last a month or two before falling apart.

Enter Kahtoola. (These links don’t contain affiliate codes, I’m just sharing because I love the product.) In Montana, I soon learned about Kahtoola, a company that makes three different models of traction cleats for different kinds of walking, running, or hiking. These cleats are expensive, roughly $70 or more, but I’ve been wearing mine from November to April every day for ten years and they show no signs of wearing out.

Kahtoola Exospikes - best all-around cleat for snow and ice. It is uncanny how I can walk down a steep grade on wet ice in these things and not slip, even a little. Super grippy and good in snow and mud too. Good for Montana.

Kahtoola Nanospikes - the nomenclature is a little confusing, but this model has smaller cleats, made for running or walking on flatter surfaces. Good for Nebraska.

Kahtoola Microspikes - You probably don’t need these unless you are traversing an ice sheet on the side of a mountain in Glacier National Park. But if you are, this is what you need.

Here’s a video of how to put them on. It does require some hand strength because the rubber grips are thick and strong, part of why they last so long and work so well. Amazon sells them, as well.

Mickey as the Sorcerer’s ApprenticeThe Sorcerer's Apprentices

If you are old enough, you may recall the 1940 Disney movie Fantasia, especially the cartoon of Dukas' symphonic poem, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," starring Mickey Mouse and a host of magic brooms. The grizzled old wizard goes to bed for the night, and Mickey works a spell to animate some brooms, which quickly multiply and wreak havoc, until the sorcerer returns and sets things right.

When it comes to the sorcery of AI, the grizzled old wizard is 78-year-old Geoffrey Hinton, the British-Canadian computer scientist commonly called "the godfather of AI." He pioneered deep learning, worked for Google Brain, and in 2024 won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on artificial neural networks. In his Nobel banquet speech, Hinton warned of "the existential threat that will arise when we create digital beings that are more intelligent than ourselves:"

We have no idea whether we can stay in control. But we now have evidence that if they are created by companies motivated by short-term profits, our safety will not be the top priority. We urgently need research on how to prevent these new beings from wanting to take control. They are no longer science fiction.

Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and the other tech bros are all playing Mickey Mouse, giddy with power and bewitched by their own creations. And the brooms? Those are the millions of AI agents that experts like Hinton and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt warn will soon operate semi-autonomously, working together, possibly developing their own language.

The tech bros are breezy and gee-whiz about it. The pitch is always the same: create an entire app just by describing it, cure cancer, revolutionize the world. Hinton might agree, but he also warns of a 10-20% chance of human extinction in the next thirty years if AI is allowed to proceed apace without guardrails. Nobody solicits his opinions any more because he doesn't seem to care about stock options or national defense.

Dario Amodei, CEO Anthropic

The torrent of AI headlines comes thick and fast, because AI implicates so much: the labor market, the stock market bubble, the price of electricity, national defense, to name only a few. If the doomscrolling makes your eyes cross, and you would like to read one thoughtful long-form essay on the promise and peril of AI, I recommend "The Adolescence of Technology: Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI" by Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, creator of the popular AI, Claude.

Like Eric Schmidt, Amodei assumes that AI agents will be semi-autonomous and will number in the millions. To focus our attention, Amodei asks:

Suppose a literal “country of geniuses” were to materialize somewhere in the world in ~2027. Imagine, say, 50 million people, all of whom are much more capable than any Nobel Prize winner, statesman, or technologist.... Suppose you were the national security advisor of a major state, responsible for assessing and responding to the situation. Imagine, further, that because AI systems can operate hundreds of times faster than humans, this "country" is operating with a time advantage relative to all other countries: for every cognitive action we can take, this country can take ten.

I often don't read these articles because they describe Black Mirror episodes I don't want to see happen in real life. No hope for us hominids. No remedy. I credit Amodei, a guy who knows the business and also drops references to Black Mirror and 2001: A Space Odyssey, for describing plausible protections, mainly transparency and mandatory reporting. If an AI tries to blackmail a human by threatening to expose the human's adulterous affair, all the players should be notified of the event and the programming that led to its manifestation.

Now that corporations and governments are waking up to the promise and peril of AI, Anthropic and its CEO appear to be leading the push from within these companies for ethical, transparent use of their products. At the end of January, the Wall Street Journal reported on Anthropic's clash with the Pentagon over whether its technology would be used for domestic surveillance and autonomous lethal operations.

"Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power," says Amodei, "and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it."

Competition

Geoffrey Hinton quit working for Google in 2023, not because he thought Google had done anything wrong, but because he wanted to freely sound the alarm about the dangers of AI, without worrying that people would think he was criticizing the products of his employer.

But these warnings from insiders may amount to almost nothing, because technology has a way of living a life of its own. As Hinton put it, "The tech giants are locked in a competition that might be impossible to stop." If country A doesn't pursue AI, country B will. Corporation A announces AI capital expenditures in the hundreds of billions, because if it doesn't, corporation B will.

This is how we ended up with an atom bomb. As J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project, put it: "When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb." Instead of worrying that the Russians will develop an atom bomb before we do, nowadays we worry that the Chinese will develop AI-powered nuclear drone armies before we do.

"This is the trap," says Amodei. "AI is so powerful, such a glittering prize, that it is very difficult for human civilization to impose any restraints on it at all."

Nonusers of AI probably think of it as just a helpful chatbot expressing itself through turbo autocomplete. But, as Amodei put it in his essay:

It does not have a physical embodiment (other than living on a computer screen), but it can control existing physical tools, robots, or laboratory equipment through a computer; in theory, it could even design robots or equipment for itself to use.

2001: A Space OdysseyMoonwatcher, from 2001: A Space Odyssey

For decades, any mention of artificial intelligence immediately brought to mind Stanley Kubrick's movie and, "Open the pod bay doors, HAL." Even Amodei alludes to it in his essay. But if AI is the Monolith 2.0, then the movie's opening is where it's at. Recall the apes at the waterhole in the "Dawn of Man" opening to 2001. An ape uses the long bone of a tapir skeleton as a war club, kills a rival ape with his new tool, and drives the rival tribe away from the water hole. What we don't see in Kubrick's movie is what happens the next day when both tribes of apes show up at the same waterhole, but now they all have bone war clubs.

Today's great apes are more likely to use AI to drive rival tribes away from land containing oil or critical minerals, but the lesson is that we forswear AI at our peril. We could end up being the only ape without a war club, and extinction soon ensues.

Which raises the question: Are we humans chauvinists when it comes to other species? Do we suppose that billions of years of evolution produced humans, and now what? Evolution stops? Do we imagine that the blind watchmaker of natural selection closes up shop and says, "Well, we sure can't do any better than human beings. Just look at their social media sites. These creatures are marvelous."

I think not. If intelligence is what separates man from beast, then it's fair to wonder how man measures up to AI, and whether humans may soon be regarded as the poultry or livestock of the new ruling species. Are we no longer the smartest monkey?

We may soon find out, because the difference between Disney's cartoon and our situation is the ending. In Fantasia, the sorcerer comes back and fixes everything. But Geoffrey Hinton is the sorcerer, and he's already warned us that he doesn't know how to stop the brooms.

The Acolyte: A Novel

I'm waiting on cover art for my next novel. I'll send in the next issue of this newsletter.

Not Real. Yet. Google’s Gemini Made It For Me.2025 The Year Of AI

Who will be Time Magazine's person of the year for 2025?

A week before Time's announcement is due (December 11th), I put the question to three well-regarded AIs, and my prompt had the cloud data centers thrumming for 1.3 seconds, while Claude, Grok, and Gemini consulted the prediction-market AIs, who then piped raw numbers back to my AIs, who then each delivered thoughtless thousand-word essays to me, with headings like "Leading Candidates," "Media and Expert Buzz," and "Potential Caveats."

All three AIs concluded that, this year, Time will name an AI as Person of the Year. Each cited historical precedent for nonpersons as candidates: In 1982, back before the tech bros building AIs were born, Time named "The Computer" as Person of the Year, and in 1989, the Person of the Year was "The Endangered Earth," back when environmental awareness was in the news.

According to the AIs, the AIs have a 36% chance of being named Persons of the Year, ahead of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, at 24%, popular with the AIs because he makes the computer chips they run on, and Pope Leo XIV, at 15%, the guy who prays for our lost false-idol-worshiping souls, followed by Donald Trump at 7%, and Elon Musk and Taylor Swift in the low single digits. The AIs have also concluded that anyone who suspects them of bias in naming themselves Persons of the Year is a superstitious lout who doesn't understand Large Language Models.

The year 2025 is the year of AI frenzy, in the markets, in Congress, on our phones and tablets and laptops, out the window and down the hill where the one-GigaWatt hyperscale data center is going in on that half-section where Mr. MacGregor's farm used to be, 320 acres once you count the solar panels next door. Don't worry about the new data farm using more water and electricity than San Francisco, Google's Sundar Pichai says that putting solar-powered satellite data centers in outer space is on the AIs' todo lists. Others have proposed small on-site nuclear reactors.

The stock markets predict we're about to merge with our AIs. Instead of "Have your people call my people," it will be, "No, don't use my Claude AI for business stuff. Have your Grok profile send it to my Gemini assistant."

As it happens, the AIs are all expert computer programmers. Superb coders, better than the human engineers who manage them, which worries some of the Nervous Nellies of the net, because what if the machines simply program themselves to take over?"

Congress has questions. This technology is dangerous. It could make humans an endangered species! Probably by making them too stupid to do anything without consulting their AIs.

The tech CEOs have seen this movie before, twenty-plus years ago, at the height of the dot-com boom, when we were all in a panic about something called the Singularity, a hypothetical future point at which technology and AI accelerate beyond our control, leading to an intelligence explosion and possible knowledge-enabled mass destruction, KMD.

Piffle, say the elfin tech CEOs, that will not happen, because they have guardrails in place to make sure the AIs obey Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, never harm humans, and never break any laws. Promise!

We need not worry that three or four AIs will get together and brute-force their way into the Federal Reserve's computers. Sure some of the AIs may strike up a romance with other AIs at the Treasury Department, just the way humans sometimes do, but those AIs will abide by strict computer ethical codes.

Of course there are risks, but benefits abound. Think of the time savings in fields like education. The AI writes the exam for the professor. The students have their AIs answer the questions on the exam. And the professor's AI then grades the exam. Voila. Countless hours of menial reading and writing labor saved.

Lawyers can turn their AIs loose on Google Scholar and bill by the hour, while their AIs write dense opaque paragraphs containing sentences stuffed with polysyllabic Latin derivatives carefully arranged in the passive voice, with nine dependent clauses and a few semicolonic afterthoughts tacked on for good measure. It looks and reads just like the real thing, and the judge's AI will be none the wiser.

To paraphrase William Gibson, the Singularity is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet. For instance, the field of robotics is still a few steps behind the mesmerizing pyrotechnics of the AIs crunching numbers to fold proteins and map the galaxies, so it will be a while before we have robotic valets and caregivers. Too bad, because I'm with the legions complaining about the AIs on social media. We want AIs that will take out the trash, do the dishes, scrub the floor, change the oil in our self-driving cars, and clean out the gutters. We don't want AIs to write or draw or compose music or make movies or chat with us. We can do all of those things ourselves with all the extra time and money we'll have when our crypto holdings get back in the black on Robinhood.

Meanwhile, the AI, Time's Person of the Year, is busy designing a two-GigaWatt data center to be built at the lunar south pole, and it has just sent you a Slack message: "The network engineers left a mess in the cafeteria last night. Please wash the dishes, take out the trash, and turn up the AC---these servers run hot!"

A $37 Trillion Credit Card Balance Transfer

During the last U.S. presidential election, American voters insisted that the economy was issue number one, but neither candidate campaigned on managing the national debt, or even mentioned it. Now the experts all agree that the government's $37 trillion debt is unsustainable, a scary thought, given that, since 2001, and for each of the last 24 years, the government has spent more than it took in and borrowed trillions to cover the difference. It's safe to assume that the country won't be living within its means anytime soon. But the economists don't tell us what will happen when that which is not capable of being sustained is sustained no longer?

I am not an economist. I majored in English literature and never took a business or finance course. I barely understand how treasury bonds work, but I'm told that it's how the government borrows money from investors to pay the interest on debt that it borrowed from other investors, so a little like a credit card balance transfer of $37 trillion? I remember juggling credit cards like this when I was young and foolish and completely broke. Is the government foolish and completely broke?

Should I believe the other guys in my old man's coffee group up here in Flyspeck, Montana, who tell me not to worry, because investors will always buy U.S. bonds no matter how many we sell? Why? Because the U.S. dollar is the world's safest, most trusted currency, the primary reserve currency of central banks all over the world.

How long will the dollar be the world's safest, most trusted currency if the International Monetary Fund ranks us among the world's ten most indebted countries, measured by debt-to-GDP ratio, with Greece a little more indebted than us, and Senegal and Ukraine more solvent?

What if our enemies make like Russia and start using the Chinese renminbi for their international transactions instead of the dollar? If the renminbi doesn't catch on, might other countries, like the Arab Gulf States, turn to crypto currencies or gold to teach us profligates a lesson?

Speaking of gold. It's October and the price of gold is up over 50% year-to-date? Why are investors buying gold instead of more Treasury bonds?

Should I worry that for 70 years United States treasuries held a pristine AAA rating, but now they merit only a AA rating? What if instead of giving the government more money to service its Mississippi River of debt, investors suddenly start buying bonds from companies like Microsoft, which pay about the same interest rate and have a AAA rating?

If I'm an old-timey banker or bond buyer with a sharp pencil and a green eyeshade deciding the credit worthiness of loan applicants, should I lend money to Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, whose company has $95 billion in cash and $40 billion of long-term debt? Or should I lend money to President Trump and Senate Minority leader, Chuck Schumer, who can't stop bickering long enough to sign the loan papers and whose country has zero cash and $37 trillion of long-term debt?

I was born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska, home of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway. Wealthy investors give cash to Berkshire so that experts like Buffett will invest it for them. What am I to think when Berkshire Hathaway has $350 billion in cash, almost a third of its holdings, and sees no stocks or bonds worth buying?

And how does the government respond? Time for a shutdown! Will investors line up to loan money to a country that is $37 trillion in debt and closed for business until further notice?

Will the government default on its debts? Or will it print $37 trillion new dollars and deliver them to its lenders in wheelbarrows and shipping containers?

I was driving my pickup truck to town for groceries the other day, when I heard on the radio that the shutdown could last until November, and maybe even longer. The next song up on my playlist was Creedence Clearwater Revival's Bad Moon Rising. Was that just a coincidence, or does it mean something?

Send The Dead

The Kindle ebook edition is on sale for 99 cents for a limited time.

As of this writing, it's the Number 1 release in Caribbean and Latin American Literature.

Thanks to all who left Amazon customer reviews.

Pub Day Arrives

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public. —Winston Churchill

Send The DeadRead more about Send The Dead and all four included stories at dooling.com.Purchase Send The Dead as an Amazon Kindle ebook.Purchase Send The Dead as an Amazon Paperback.

Illustration by Rob Dobi

Ten Thousand Repetitionsby Richard Dooling

When I was a boy in the 1960s, long before the Internet and 24-hour news cycles, people didn't get their news by scrolling through feeds on phones and tablets. No, they got their news from me. I was a paper boy. A professional! As were my brothers and most of my friends.

The Catholic grade school we attended in Omaha, Nebraska was a short walk from Paper Station H at 40th and Cuming, where we paper boys, thirty or forty strong, gathered every day after school with print-smeared canvass bags slung over our shoulders.

The paper station manager sat behind a battered desk on the only chair in the room and harangued us about collecting from deadbeat subscribers by Saturday, or the money would come out of our pockets.

We paper boys sprawled on our backs on long wooden tables and waited for the truck from downtown to bring bundles of the Omaha World-Herald, evening edition.

The manager passed around handfuls of rubber bands, which we did not need, because we were experts at folding and tucking newspapers into tight rolls that could survive a long toss onto a front porch. No rubber bands needed, but we took them anyway because, while we waited for the truck, which was often late, we used the rubber bands to shoot flies off the ceiling.

Go ahead and be skeptical that a nine-year-old shooting a rubber band off the tip of his left index finger could kill a fly on a high ceiling, but I assure you it was a skill so easily mastered that we were soon jaded fly assassins looking for something with a little more razzle-dazzle.

How about shooting a rubber band to put out a lit match at ten paces? Also so easy that we soon specified that one had to "snuff" the flame without hitting the head of the match itself, no consolation prize for guttering the flame without putting it out.

The manager volubly disapproved of us playing with matches in a newspaper station, so we were soon back on the tables shooting flies off the ceiling. It was so easy to kill the flies, we began wagering on whether it was possible to just "wing" them by turning one's shooting finger sideways and attempting to injure the fly without killing it.

Wanton boys, we soon observed that properly "winged" flies usually fell to the table and crawled in circles, clockwise if the fly had a damaged right wing, and counterclockwise if the injury was to the left wing. As in billiards, the marksman now had to call his wing shot before firing. "Left!"

Such were the skills I acquired in my formative paper-boy years. These days progressives fret that making fourth graders carry Sunday papers over a two-mile route through subzero Nebraska blizzards amounts to child abuse, whereas conservatives want to hear about how important it was for me to work and earn money at an early age, collect payments from subscribers, show up every day and make sure people got their newspapers on time.

Maybe, but I think I learned more from shooting rubber bands at flies. The same lessons that Malcolm Gladwell once turned into an entire book called Outliers, whose central premise is the unsurprising idea that if you do something a lot, you'll probably get good at it, whether it's rewriting sentences, programming computers, shooting free throws, parenting, napping, or hunting spider monkeys with a blow gun in the tree canopy of an Amazon jungle.

These skills, once embedded, may atrophy over the years, but like riding a bicycle, one never forgets. Forty-some years after I delivered my last newspaper, I was on a book tour, speaking to readers in a bookstore somewhere in the Midwest. In the middle of my presentation an aggressive wasp flew into the room and began dive bombing members of the audience, causing a stir when people covered their heads and moved away.

When the wasp landed on one of the light fixtures, I asked the audience if anyone had a rubber band.

I don't remember if I sold any books that day, but I received a standing ovation when the wasp fell to the floor in two pieces.

Substack

If you read or write on Substack, you may have noticed that I just started publishing there as well. For now, I mean to publish the occasional stand-alone essay on Substack, but I'll write more and better stuff for this newsletter, the one for which you kindly signed up. No ads or nudges here. No chats, restacking, retweeting, notes, comments, likes, or mentions here. But if you need to reach me, just hit reply, and I'll eventually get your email.

If you are a Substacker and read me over there, I did my best to turn off every request for payment that I could find in the Substack settings. If an orange button asks you for money, it's not me, so please ignore it. If this leaves you with a sad feeling of unrequited generosity, please leave a Goodreads review or an Amazon customer review for one of my books. That helps more than anything.

Happy Fall!The trees are in their autumn beauty,The woodland paths are dry,Under the October twilight the waterMirrors a still sky;

Yeats, The Wild Swans of Coole

A Novella and Four StoriesPub DateOctober 6th Amazon Release

Send The Dead will be released on Amazon as a print paperback and as a Kindle ebook on October 6th, 2025. The novella and story collection will also participate in Amazon's Kindle Unlimited program.

Kindle Ebook Preorders

Kindle users may preorder Send The Dead at Amazon for only $2.99, and the ebook will appear on their Kindle devices on the release date. Print copies can't be ordered until the October 6th release date. I will try to provide advance notice of any giveaways on Goodreads or Amazon.

The Book Jacket Blurb

Young Marina January offers guided tours of plantation ruins and historical landmarks all over the island of St. John. In the taverns, coffee houses, and national parks, she gives storytelling lectures on the history of the Virgin Islands, teaching tourists about the St. John Slave Uprising of 1733.

One evening, she’s approached by an acclaimed director who is making a new historical film, and the production company is setting up shop on the shores of St. John. He wishes to recruit Marina as a cultural liaison and consultant, a promising turn of events just in time to pay this month’s rent.

Her first day on set, the film’s handsome star, Gabriel Nash, takes a liking to Marina and offers her yet another opportunity: to be his personal assistant. Willing to work dual roles, Marina agrees, until she discovers that Nash is a narcissist with dangerous secrets. His obsessions nearly kill her. But he misjudges her appetite for revenge and her expertise in the lore of the occult.

With his novella Send the Dead, New York Times bestselling author Richard Dooling concocts a potent brew of literary horror mixed with history, Hollywood, tropical sun, and supernatural terror. Along for the ride are four other short works that appeared in The New Yorker, Story, Smoke, and Esquire magazines: speculative stories about aging and immortality, religion, culture shock, science, magic, all-too-human madness, and the tyranny of the normal.

The Four Short Stories

The novella, Send The Dead, comes with four of my favorite short stories.

Bush Pigs

Originally published in the New Yorker, this harrowing tale is a cult favorite among expats who wander abroad and are unprepared for the shock that awaits them upon return to the States. After three years in the bush, a Peace Corps Volunteer is evacuated from war-torn Sierra Leone and sent home to Omaha, Nebraska, where he attempts to celebrate his return in a steak house. What happens next is called reverse culture shock. G.K. Chesterton put it this way: "The whole object of traveling abroad is not to set foot on foreign land; it is to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land when one returns."

How Bush Pigs Came To Be

Parts of my second novel, White Man's Grave, are set in a village in Sierra Leone, where a Peace Corps Volunteer has gone missing under suspicious circumstances. Many readers come away from it thinking that I was a Peace Corps Volunteer. I was not, but a good friend from college, Mike O'Neill, was, and I stayed with him for months in the remote village of Mbundobu.

Among many other talents, Mike has a gift for languages. He spoke several tribal languages, especially Mende, and took me all over Sierra Leone on the back of his Peace-Corps-issued Honda motorbike. We shared many adventures, some of which are in White Man's Grave.

About ten years after my visit and just before White Man's Grave was published, Mike actually did go missing in Sierra Leone, where he led the Red Cross relief operation. Mike was captured by rebel teenage warriors in the east of Sierra Leone. He was held for thirty days, during which time the village he was in was bombed. He eventually walked 47 miles through the bush, No Man's Land, between the rebels and the government troops and was reunited with his family and returned to Buffalo, New York, where he had grown up before I met him. I spoke to Mike by phone soon after his safe return and heard his incredible story. That night and the next day, I wrote the first part of Bush Pigs. The second part, set in a steakhouse in Omaha, was an out-take from an early draft of White Man's Grave.

Performances of Bush Pigs

Bush Pigs was published in the New Yorker in 1994. National Public Radio played an audio version of the story a few times, and I received well-wishes from many expats and returned Peace Corps volunteers (RPCVs) who heard it. A few years later, Symphony Space in New York City asked actor Mark Nelson to read Bush Pigs live at its Selected Shorts program. The performance also included a reading of Jumpha Lahiri's Hell-Heaven.

I have permission to share the Selected Shorts audio version with you, but please do not download or distribute it, as I do not own the rights to the recording, just the underlying story.

Mark Nelson reads Bush Pigs at Symphony Space

Mapping God's Voice

The venerable Story magazine has been around since 1931 and published Truman Capote, Joyce Carol Oates, Carol Shields, and many others along the way. In the 1990s, Story was edited by the beloved Lois Rosenthal, under whose direction the magazine was five-time finalist and two-time winner of the National Magazine Award for fiction.

Lois was a fan of my third novel, Brain Storm, which was, in part, about forensic neuroscience and scanning criminals to detect abnormalities that may have caused them to malfunction. Lois called once with a question about temporal lobe epilepsy. It may have been a ruse, because when I mentioned that Dostoyevsky suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy, and that he had once said that he would trade ten years of his life for a single aura, the often mystical sensation that precedes a seizure, Lois said, "I want you to write a story about that for me."

So I did. But more than neuroscience, Mapping God's Voice probably came from working nights on a psych ward in my early twenties to pay off my college loans. I took the job because, if the patients slept, I could read and write all night. But at least once a week, my literary labors were interrupted by a distressed patient who needed my help, because God was talking to them, speaking in plain English, about glory and eternity. The doctors were saying, take this pill and you'll stop hearing God's voice, but why in God's name would I want to stop hearing God's voice?

Paleopsychosis

I wish I could say something noble or uplifting about this story, but it amounts to the literary equivalent of a drinking song for evolutionary psychologists and paleoanthropologists. Peking Man and Piltdown Man chase the Venus of Willendorf around a prehistoric tavern called Stone Binge. I still like it, or it would not be in this collection, but it could be charitably described as sophomoric.

It originally appeared in Smoke magazine, a men's cigar-themed magazine.

Diary of An Immoral Man

Back near the turn of the century, longevity was much in the news and on the minds of researchers, who were looking into extending human life spans to 150 years and beyond. In 1999, Esquire magazine called with a proposal: Would I write the diary of the first man who lives forever? Would I pretend to be the first person who escapes the grave by taking anti-aging drugs and regenerative medical treatments? If I get cancer of the liver, they explained, I don't die, I get a new liver transplanted in me that was grown from my own stem cells. And then what happens?

This piece was a finalist for the National Magazine Award. I call it a speculative essay, but it could pass for a short story.

Send The DeadCover Art

We have cover art! Publication soon!

A Novella and Four StoriesSend The Dead

In February of 2002, we escaped a brutal Nebraska winter and vacationed for a week on the island of St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands. White sandy beaches, turquoise seas, yes, all of that, but over half of St. John is national parkland, most of it forested mountains. I am not a beach person, but I'll do just about anything for a view, and hiking St. John offered amazing vistas over the Caribbean.

I hiked to a few historic sugar plantation ruins, including the famous and scenic Annaberg Sugar Plantation ruins and the less-scenic and, in my opinion, thoroughly haunted Reef Bay Trail and Sugar Plantation ruins. Both date from the 18th century, when sugar was the most precious commodity on earth, and the Caribbean was the best place to grow it.

In those days, sugar was white gold and an instant sensation in Europe, but so expensive that most commoners could not afford even a taste of it. Sugar production also required a massive labor force. Five times the manpower it took to grow cotton or tobacco, because the cane spoiled unless it was processed the same day it was cut. Enter the slave trade, and the Danish plantation owners could be brutal masters. Walk those ruins at dusk, and you will hear cries of anguish from centuries ago.

On other hikes, I learned about the St. John Slave Uprising of 1733, when enslaved West Africans led by Breffu, an Awkwamu warrior princess, rose up and killed more than sixty colonial plantation owners, managers, and their families. The slaves captured the fort in Coral Bay, took control of the island, and held it for six months. The Rebellion was one of the earliest and most successful slave revolts in the Americas, until the Danish governor hired an army of French maroon hunters from Martinique. Led by the sadist, Commander Chevalier de Longueville, the maroon hunters pursued, captured, and tortured all of the surviving rebels, except those who took their own lives to avoid such a fate.

Soon rebellion stories occupied my reading list and my dreams, but what to do with them? I went from thinking I'd write an essay, no, too short. A nonfiction book, no, too long. A screenplay, which I almost sold, twice! Ah, Hollywood fish stories. A historical novel, already been done. Night Of The Silent Drums, by John L. Anderson. Call it process of elimination, novella was the only form left, unless I wanted to take a stab at epic poetry in my old age. Instead of historical fiction, I wrote a story about filmmakers making a movie, shooting on location in St. John, a movie about the St. John Slave Uprising of 1733. A modern tale, but told against the gore and glory of history.

No Preorders

I decided against preorders, because why pay in advance when you might get an e-book for free? The book-launch marketing and advertising for Send The Dead will likely include at least one giveaway campaign. Outfits like Bookbub, NetGalley, and Amazon itself allow free or discounted e-book copies to be had, in the hopes that early readers will write reviews on Goodreads or Amazon. If you are a Kindle person, you might get a free e-book. I will provide advance notice of any giveaways, so watch your inbox.

Send The Dead will be available on Amazon as a print paperback edition, or as a Kindle e-book. The collection will also participate in Amazon's Kindle Unlimited program.

I will tell you much more about the novella and each of the four short stories soon.

Issue #3

This is Issue #3 of I Would Prefer Not To, the Send The Dead Cover Art Issue.

Issue #2, the Warren Buffett IssueIssue #1 welcomes subscribers to I Would Prefer Not To , a quarterly miscellany published by Richard Dooling. Find other issues at the Archives.

The Warren Buffett IssueHappy Spring

First, a week ago Warren Buffett announced that he will be stepping down from his job as the top dog at Berkshire Hathaway. I gathered links to four New York Times opinion pieces I've written about Buffett over the years. He is a first-class wit and fun to write about.

The issue, then, is whether a witch person, or witch host would always know he or she had a witch spirit. The Mende disagree on this point, and so do the anthropologists. Some say that when a witch enters a village, it is like a powerful sound in a room filled with tuning forks. Or let’s use a Mende proverb: Hinda a wa hinda. ‘Something brings something,’ or, even better, ‘Like brings out like.’ In the Midwest, they might say, ‘If you plant corn, you get corn,’ something like that. Anyway, some forks respond to the frequency, others don’t, and those responding can ‘feel’ the frequency—they know they are witches, even though they will always deny it.

But others say that often a witch host sees only malice, chaos, destruction, and evil all around him. As time goes on, he senses that the evil seems always to be linked to him. Then, perhaps he has a dream, or is skillfully questioned by a looking-around man or a witchfinder. Suddenly the witch host realizes that the darkness he always so quickly saw in others is really only his own dark powers reflected in the looking glasses of their innocent hearts. He discovers that the evil he had always ascribed to human nature is really the fruit of his own wicked labors. He planted seeds, and now the harvest has come in. His life is filled with evil people, because they are his converts, members of his coven. In one horrible instant, he sees that he is the cause of much of the despair, destruction, and evil in his life. He may have convinced himself that he was only using bad medicine to protect himself—so-called defensive medicines, or counter-swears—but before long, he discovers that he has a witch spirit, and the witch-spirit has gradually … taken over.

Excerpted from White Man’s Grave, a novel by Richard Dooling

White Man's Grave: A Novel

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