Monorama

by Tony Laplume

A book of short stories in seven parts, Monorama explores the world of the future beginning with the Lost Books of Tomorrow, a collection of short works that attempt to define the most mystifying elements of where we're all headed, including robots, time travel, and melancholy. From there, consider the story of Falling Man, who survives a malfunctioning parachute only to regret his second chance to romance the girl of his dreams. In Back from the Dead, a minor superhero comes back and disrupts the delicate balance of power. The denizens of the Roadkill Cafe are an assortment of cats and dogs and one fly who have begun sharing their stories with an unwitting human visitor. In the novella Leopold's Concentration, you will follow two more unfortunate souls thrust into the inner workings of pets, whose biggest secrets may yet affect us all, or perhaps just infect us with madness. Lost Convoy examines the plight of those who witness the end of the world and attempt to reach a new home for humanity. Finally, in Quagmire you'll find a fragment from the foundation myth of an intergalactic empire.

232 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 2, 2012

About the author

Tony Laplume was born in 1980, spent a few years in Rhode Island, but started making his mark in the world when his family relocated to Maine, where he attended every year of his schooling, including college at the University of Maine in Orono (except for a year at Mercyhurst College in Erie, PA), where he earned a Bachelor's Degree in English. In high school, he created the comic strip "Newsroom" for the Academic Advocate, which published it from 1998-1999. He wrote a regular opinion column for UMaine's Maine Campus from 2002-2003. He co-founded and worked on the Hemlock literary journal from 2003-2004. In 2007, he co-created the short-lived literary journal Dead Letter Quarterly with A.C. Hall and Derek Koch. He also self-published The Cloak of Shrouded Men that year. He has since completed two additional novels, Pale Moonlight and The Whole Bloody Affair.

Reviews

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

A wide variety of sci-fi stories come together in this short story collection. The first "story" called "Lost Books of Tomorrow" is a series of 32 vignettes I suppose you could say. Each of those could be a longer story in its own right. The one after that about someone whose parachute doesn't open after a skydiving accident is sort of dull and in my opinion the weakest of the collection. a couple of other stories don't have what I'd consider a satisfying conclusion, but overall this is a very good read, a whirlwind of imagination as I called it once.

That is all.

[Tony Laplume · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a self-published book. This is one of my self-published books. The editing can be atrocious.

Aside from that, after completing a reread of the whole thing in published form, I'm still pretty darn proud of the material. The opening section, "Lost Books of Tomorrow," reveals some of my predilections as a writer, as far as themes go, that have echoes in the other material, plus at least one story that ties directly into other sections (the one involving Kentucky Joe and the cow, which is linked with "Roadkill Cafe" and the Leopold's Concentration novella in the second half of the book).

"Falling Man" is one of the older stories in the collection, and I find myself interested in that one even though when I was originally compiling the collection, I was least sure of it. There's a lot more of what my later writing would look like, including some of the longer pieces within "Lost Books," that can be found there.

"Back from the Dead" is one my infrequent superhero prose efforts, along with my first self-published work, The Cloak of Shrouded Men.

"Roadkill Cafe" is one of the later stories to find its way into the collection. It's the latest version of a story that I've been trying to write since high school, and on the surface it has the least to do with previous attempts, but it has since become integral to the overall conception. It's a perfect segue to Leopold, which is one of the oldest, a story I didn't finish at the time I originally tackled it, and that always haunted me, but reading it back has helped me see how the point I ended on was a perfect one, not just to introduce doubt within its own narrative (a necessary element for this story), but has since helped me further revise the overall story I hope to one day complete out of it.

"Lost Convoy" has echoes of a story I'm currently working on, which I wasn't even consciously aware of as I was plotting it, but more importantly, like Leopold and "Falling Man" it's a snapshot to a previous period in my life, a touchstone both in my writing and my life in general. It's also my version of Lost, the TV series, if Sawyer had turned out to be the main character (that's who Gabriel Martinez is, or my version of Sawyer, anyway).

Most significant in this collection is "Quagmire," which is the first piece of actual prose to come from my long-in-development Space Corps project. It reads far more like fantasy than any story I've since developed for that project, but it lays a lot of groundwork, and hopefully is a little fun in its own right.

Aside from the gross negligence in textual editing, I'm still pleased to present this as a sampler of my prose, my ideas and the writing itself. That was the whole idea to begin with, collecting shorter works that might give you an idea of what my longer works are like (but not quite!), in case you wanted to believe in me as a writer. Reading it back, now a year and a half since its release, I'm especially pleased. I like what I saw. I'm proud. I hope if anyone else wants to have a look, they'll like it too.