Concussion Cover-Up: A Chalk Short Story

by Carac Allison

LA Private Investigator Chalk searches for a study on concussions the NFL secretly commissioned back in 1980. Proof of its existence would reveal the league knew about the dangers of the sport long before they took legal responsibility. It could threaten the ongoing existence of American's game. Chalk is closing in on the lost report when he discovers that a former player is ahead of him in the chase. Does the player want to protect or damn the game that broke his body and his mind?

ebook

First published September 6, 2014

About the author

Carac started playing with PET and Tandy computers when he was a young teen. He learned to write on a Commodore 64 but he was never much of a programmer. It was the connections the computers made possible that interested him: the connections between people alone in the dark listening to the strange music of modems, the pirated games they shared and the bulletin boards they chatted on before the internet.

At York University Carac studied English Literature. He read modernist and contemporary novelists but his main interest was always the detective genre. He wrote about the works of Raymond Chandler, H.P. Lovecraft and William Gibson.

While studying in Toronto he fell in love with the theater. Unable to afford the ticket prices as an impoverished undergrad he became a reviewer for a small magazine called Scene. This made it possible for him to see almost everything that came to the stage. His first play, Luck is a Lady, was produced in his freshmen year at Calumet College.

Finished his undergraduate degree, Carac started working for the University of Western Ontario as a low level clerk. Soon after he began transforming paper forms into web forms. This streamlined service delivery and brought an office still dependent on microfiche and stamps into the right century. He went on to found the Web and IT Team in Student Services. He has directed projects on database security, electronic data interchange, mobile devices and distributed online identity.

For too many years following the performance of his first play, Carac had amateur workshops and small productions of his dramatic works. These titles were always focused on adult relationships in the blossoming age of the internet—hidden love, secretive lust and virtual sex. He was a finalist in Theatre BC’s national playwriting competition with Cardboard Boxes. But professional success on the stage never came for him.

For his Masters in the Philosophy of Education Carac studied the psychology of crime in the HBO prison drama Oz. And he wrote about how technology is changing concepts of value in higher education.

Carac’s last role within Academia was focused on IT Security. As a member of Western’s Information Group on Security, the Risk Assessment team and an investigator in student hacking cases, he has seen the good, the bad and the ugly of the digital frontier.
During a difficult divorce Carac was motivated to learn about surveillance technology and he began writing Chalk’s stories.

Carac now lives in London Canada with his wife Beth and their children.

Reviews

[Hobart · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an outtake from a blog post discussing the Chalk Short Stories over at The Irresponsible Reader. It probably works better in the context of the whole, but, you never know.
---
First thing to know is that when Mr. Allison says "Short Story," he means short. This is annoying, but I'll get to in a moment. However, it's a great length for reading while sitting in uncomfortable hard plastic chairs while waiting for an elementary school musical to begin.

Still, it had juuuuuuust enough of good ol' Chalk to make you want the next novel.

Chalk's trying to track down -- or at least confirm the existence of -- a report from the 1980's showing that the NFL was fully aware of concussion (and other) risks. A report that just might be an Urban Legend -- or it could be the smoking gun to force the League to pony up the money to pay for medical care/damages to many, many current and former athletes. Sort of like the papers that demonstrated that Tobacco Executives knew about Nicotine's addictiveness long ago.

I just didn't get enough to justify Chalk's reaction at the end, not enough meat to chew on during these 12 pages. This one felt incomplete. I'd need to see more of it before I could really get a handle on it.

[Timothy Dalton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very quick short story, and I read it in the span of 15-20 minutes maybe. I had finished Dark Digital Sky the week prior and was looking to read more on the Protagonist, Chalk. However, although this is a nice little side-story and I know I feel like I'm getting a bit greedy here, but I wanted more than this little snippet. Still as a short story it starts up and ends nicely.

[Larry Piper · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this short story, Chalk hunts down the last remaining copy of an old report the National Football League had commissioned and then suppressed regarding concussions in the sport. He finds it in the hands, perhaps, of a brain-damaged former player, and contemplates the needless suffering people must endure for the profit of others.