Showing results by narrator "Joel Froomkin" in All Categories

Denton Moulton, a shy, effeminate male professor, lives inside his head, where he is really a long-dead movie star: the glamorous Gloria Grahame, from the golden age of Hollywood. Professor Moulton is desperate to reveal Gloria’s shocking secret before he dies.

The time: the waning years of the 1990s at the dawn of the millennium. The place: an isolated rural town called Auburn, which could be anywhere at all - a town where everyone knows everyone else - where dark secrets run through its veins like blood. Everyone knows that 16-year old Mikey Childress is "different." A target for bullies since he was a small boy, everything Mikey does attracts abuse: the way he walks, the way he talks, the way he looks. Everyone knows he's not like the other boys in Auburn - the boys who play hockey, who fight, the boys who pursue girls.

It’s the end of summer 2003. George W. Bush has recently declared the mission in Iraq accomplished, the unemployment rate is at its highest in years, and Martha Stewart has just been indicted for insider trading. Meanwhile, somewhere in the Midwest, Troy Augustus Loudermilk (fair-haired, statuesque, charismatic) and his companion Harry Rego (definitely none of those things) arrive at America’s most prestigious creative-writing program, to which Loudermilk has recently been accepted for his excellence in poetry. Loudermilk, however, has never written a poem in his life.

The plan is finally set: a divine, multi-pronged ambush targeting Providence where it's weakest. Five gods. Five demons. Five simultaneous strategic executions. Against a brutal corporate autocracy, the odds are worth the risk. But even as deities start falling, it becomes clear the company hasn't given up all its secrets. In the opening left behind, background forces converge, exposing other plans than Loki's. With the balance of power crashing, creation steers with it.