Balloonheart

by Tom Janikowski

Balloonheart tells the age-old story of the struggle for freedom. The novella is set somewhere in middle America after a post-war collapse of society. Remnants of the government and the military-industrial complex have forged an alliance and cooperate in a re-ordered and fortified microcosm of post-modern civilization known as "the Project," which produces arms and materiel and seeks to enforce some order in what they attempt to portray as a very hostile world. A man whom we come to know only as "Hombre" narrates his path from his civilian home to the bowels of the Project and out again. He is aided in his quest for freedom by the ghost of a friend of his who was killed in an industrial accident within the Project. "Ed's Ghost" appears to the Hombre at critical times and helps the Hombre ask the right questions. The reader comes to see that perhaps some things are not quite as they seem - in the Hombre's world and in our own, as well.

106 pages, Paperback

First published August 28, 2014

About the author

Tom Janikowski was born in 1968 in Cudahy, Wisconsin, the grandson of Pomeranian and Carpathian immigrants who left Poland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Janikowski studied English and philosophy at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee and eventually at the University of Wisconsin - Stevens Point, where he studied fiction under author Larry Watson (Let Him Go, Montana 1948, Orchard) and poetry under William L.M.H. Clark. Graduating in 1994 with a philosophy degree, Janikowski's professional writing for a long time consisted of strictly non-fiction endeavors, including book reviews for GP Light, the English supplement to Gwiazda Polarna - the nation's largest Polish-language newspaper.

After lengthy forays into songwriting, bartending, and the self-publishing of poetry chapbooks, Janikowski continued his studies and earned a Master's Degree in 2002. Despite this setback, he is still able to write in complete sentences and in the past several years has focused almost exclusively on writing fiction. His flashes and short stories have appeared online and in print on both sides of the Atlantic. Now represented by Monika Luukkonen of Oulu, Finland, he has begun working in longer forms and his forthcoming Crawford County Sketchbook (due out late in 2014 from Red Hen Press of Pasadena, CA) is a collection of tales set in a rural county somewhere in the deep South.

Janikowski has been greatly influenced by "Lost Generation" authors such as William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, but he also admits long-standing love affairs with the writing of Kurt Vonnegut and John Updike. Formerly a resident of Upstate New York and a frequenter of several speakeasies inthe Catskills, he currently works, posts at www.martinipen.com, and mixes cocktails in Davenport, Iowa, where he lives with Shelly, his best friend and beloved wife of 15 years.