Viral Load

by Gary S. Kadet

Meet IT worker Phil Small: he's stone crazy and set on a dark path toward fascism. He's also about to become a true American hero.

Upon his release from the seedy Surrey Behavioral Center, where the voices in his head fought to take control of his life, Phil mistakenly believes he's won the battle. Fellow psychiatric patient Sylva Glade moves in with him just at the point where Phil is diagnosed with Hepatitis C.

Taking place before the development of such recent Hep' C cures Harvoni, Mavyret and Sovaldi, Phil is forced to take the agonizing, semi-effective Interferon cure, whose side effects prove worse than the disease itself and ravage Phil entirely, stripping him down to a virtual human skeleton. Now finding Phil to be of little use, Sylva leaves him for a better meal ticket. As the vicious Hep' C treatment progresses, the ceaseless voices blend with a continuous stream of cable news and convince Phil to become a fascist as his ultimate destiny.

Phil meets liberal leftist Esther Shill during a street scuffle with a cop. She helps him through his murderous treatment and drags him to a lecture on politics given by neo-fascist anti-Semite Shlomo Blankfein, leader of the Public Choice Group. The clouds part and Phil finally gets the clarity he needs. He joins Shlomo's merry band of fascists and delights in their plan to wreak political havoc on the "libtards."

During a fascist-driven riot at a pro-government rally, Phil is arrested and wrongly identified (with help from Shlomo) as the local AntiFa (Anti-Fascist) ringleader. Suddenly famous, Phil sets out to make AntiFa look as bad as possible, quoting fascist doctrine at media appearances But things never seem to go Phil's way. Instead of sabotaging the AntiFa agenda, he becomes their hero.

Try as he might to say and do all the WRONG things - Phil just seems somehow to keep getting them right.

306 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 29, 2022

About the author

Gary S. Kadet was a journalist for 15 years working the crime, arts and general assignments beats for such newspapers as the Boston Herald, Globe and the Quincy Patriot Ledger. He was the Crime Editor for the nationally read Boston Book Review and wrote for Playboy Magazine, which published his fiction. He also ran the world's tenth-largest adult website and was a trailblazer in the early years of the Internet. He's the author of the literary thriller/romance novel "D/s - an Anti-Love Story" with Tor/Forge/Macmillan which was a main selection of the Doubleday book-of-the-month-club. The work broke new ground in detailing the seamy side of real-world (non-fantasy) BDSM, much to the chagrin of its self-appointed "community," who felt threatened by this work of fiction (in the same way bogus preachers felt about Sinclair Lewis' "Elmer Gantry"). Not shying away from controversy, his newest work is the literary novel "The Ogre Life," which on the surface is about the world of bodybuilding and all its attendant sexual fetishism, sleaze and drug use, but which actually questions the meaning of reality itself.