Stranger Souls

by Jim Cherry

1000 word summary: Of all the stranger souls I've met none are stranger than these, & none stranger than me. The thing is all these selves ...are me That say's it all. Stranger Souls is the fragmentation of a personality, mine. I am the killer, the vampire, the drunk, the lover, the star. As are you. The farther I go in, the further I reach out. At this point most authors might give a synopsis or an overview of the stories, tell you his favorite ones, or the genesis of each. Stranger Souls is a pastiche of genre's, science fiction, sword and sorcery are represented as well as traditional fiction to create a whole. Each story is a crossroads, where the characters meet to try and understand the strategies each employs to avoid the void, as it were, to fill the hole we all feel within ourselves. The world presented may resemble a world you think you're familiar with, but it isn't. The whole being created is a replication of the known world to explore a truth of life. There are two 'cycles' within the stories. The first cycle takes place in neighborhood bar from the perspective of its different customers. There's also the Hollywood cycle, that attempts to study fame and the seeking of fame and how it affects the people involved. Stranger Souls is a journey from the darker aspects of life and ourselves, to the light, and trying to reconcile that darkness with happiness.

99 pages, Paperback

First published October 29, 2004

About the author

I was born November 13, 1960, and experienced all the kaleidoscope impressions of childhood, my Mother reading to me, acting out all the parts and me seeing the pictures in my head. When I was 5, I danced on the corner and made it rain. I’d discovered power. It was child’s play.

I soaked up the idealism of the times and read everything that came my way. At 13, I decided I wanted to be a writer. I wrote, usually copying the style of whatever I was reading. At 19, I burned all those journals and essays. I increased my reading and started to learn how to write. Starting slowly with slogans, then sentences, then poems, and finally paragraphs. I traveled, wanting to live the life of the writers I read about, New Orleans, Germany, Los Angeles, all stops for adventure.

My poems starting getting published in the 90’s, along with a couple of short stories, I wrote my first novel Becoming Angel after returning from Germany where I had gone to get dumped by a girl. I wrote the book in six months writing six revisions, one a month. I wrote Stranger Souls, a book of short stories and it turned out to be a examination of the different elements of my personality, the farther I went in, the further I reached out. And The Last Stage is a look at our fascination with fame.

If you want to know more about me you can find me in the pages of my books, in between the lines.

I've recently started writing articles about The Doors at www.examiner.com/x-21763-the-doors-ex...