Mel C. Thompson

Saint John, a bipolar saint with multiple-personality disorder, and his sex-crazed pagan priestess, Helen, have quite a romance going on. Athenodorus, a perennially-single island-resort owner, finds himself hosting Helen and John as their erotic, religious and accidentally-political adventures ensue. The island's doctor, Pantheonus, a physician with a deep interest in psychology, tries to care for and analyze John, the poet, prophet and madman, as his life and fate drags everyone around him into deeper and deeper peril. The book is written in modern-day conversational motif, and, as was briefly a fashion in cinema, is written in a style that pretends not to notice many modern references occurring in a supposedly-ancient setting. Because of the book's heavy use of traumatic matters and dark subjects, it may be difficult for some readers to view the work as the comedy it really is. Further complicating things is the fact that the book is an unabashed effort to get other authors to work on creating a modern-day mythology to replace some of the now more hopelessly-irrelevant mythologies we've been stuck with. The book is written with cinema in mind and moves more like a movie than a novel. The possible dates of the scenes in this story are blurred to include possible comedic-revisionist allusions to such figures as Nero, Caligula, Augustus Caesar and Constantine. I deliberately refrain from saying whether the island where much of the action takes place is in Greece or Rome. (To push the date, time and continuity problems to the limit, I include a character from my other works who time travels between the modern United States and ancient Asia in order to carry on with his history-disrupting adventures.) The student of history and theology will notice my tacky use of precisely twenty-two chapters, the number of chapters in the actual Book of Revelations. In spite of these "lofty" considerations, the book steers clear of anything like goody-good-ism and fights, at every turn, to inject shock-value subjects and hair-raising horror so that the reader is never allowed to sink into any kind of bedtime-story certainty about any proposition, whether historical, philosophical or social. These effects are not so hard to achieve, since I am myself a continual border-crosser, moving myself from profound Agnosticism to credulous believerhood and back again. The work invites the reader to decide everything for themselves and seeks only to offer a wide array of confusing and unresolvable options.

Our protagonist hears from his friends in Costa Mesa that a kind of personality-cult leader is currently trendy among the higher social circles of Orange County. Because he views himself, despite his age, as an aspiring socialite, he insists on meeting the man who goes by the name Solomon Wedge. (The name is a hybrid of the Solomon of the Hebrew scriptures and the dangerous surfing spot off of Newport Beach called The Wedge.) Our socialite is not a believer in superstitions new or old, but agrees to a kind of initiation rite in order to be on the inside of all things Orange County. Although the initiation consists of merely walking the length of Harbor Boulevard over the course of a week or so, the protagonist is nonetheless too insecure and cowardly to endure the enterprise alone, and so he brings along an inscrutable friend who is never quoted directly, but only spoken about by our hero. In spite of this annoying limitation, the partner is a kind of force of nature, or perhaps an alter ego. The story is driven forward by stark personality divergences in the two traveling companions and by the fact that Solomon awaits them at the end of their quest. Whether what they encounter has nothing to do with Harbor Boulevard or everything to do with it, only the reader can decide. Like an empty container, perhaps the street has the potential to be filled with anything we put in it. The street in the story seems at least twice as long as the actual one is, but its true length is anyone's guess.

An angry, solitary Incel bangs out angry articles from his mancave apartment in Los Angeles. He rents an apartment from a gun-toting, old-world Russian. Roger, a sexist-but-progressive publisher employs Victoria-Elizabeth, a feminist journalist, to cover, among other things, the men's rights movement. Roger orders his reporter to give a neutral account of the manosphere, and she gets the inside scoop by bribing Incel with expensive wining and dining. Her ongoing series is popular with both liberals and conservatives, but her and Incel's plans run into a problem with Nature itself. And Nature comes calling in the form of "e," a supernatural but under-informed being who himself gets confused while trying to form relationships with humans and carry out nature's directives. Very little comes off as planned, and, in the end, that's just the way evolution likes it.

An anxiety-disorder poet sedates himself with multiple glasses of chardonnay and boards a nonstop flight from SFO to YEG and writes two cycles of short, spontaneous poems as he scours the greater Edmonton metropolitan area for phenomena that will inspire his unruly and jaded mind. This collection of five-line and three-line short poems sometimes comments directly on the Edmonton experience itself, and at other times muses on the Canadian and American experience as a whole. And yet other pieces are simple reflections on the poet's own inner life inspired by various urban and suburban architecture and landscapes to be seen in places like Sherwood Park, Saint Albert, West Edmonton, and The Old Strathcona.

A crippled, anxiety-ridden, precocious, apostate youth minister leaves his ministry to become a motel desk clerk in a sometimes tacky / sometimes upscale tourist motel in suburban Orange County. He lumbers around in a full-length walking cast as his fragile leg-bones are resistant to healing. His unkempt red hair is down to his shoulders and his wispy, unsightly beard make him look like outcast hippie. In fact, he is a nerdy Philosophy student at a nearby college. His reactions to the wide range of unsavory characters and upright citizens he's exposed to on this job reveal him to be alternately socially clueless and sometimes socially adept. Ever at war with his work-ethic-oriented employer from Taiwan, and always having to adjust to the odd resident managers he works with, there is no end to the debates, the conflicts and the moments of rapturous joy. It is a window into a shady, questionable, but fully-lived life, the outcome of which history may or may not opt to judge kindly. In a cry for understanding, the author cites the immortal line from the movie "American Hustle: " "You know, sometimes in life, all you have are fucked up, poisonous choices." And even so, the author and the reader are left to guess which of those choices are the least destructive. The protagonist tries his best, and the results are mixed

Guilty Sinner has a problem with his homeland. His homeland could have been some version of Orange County in the 1970s or the Bay Area of today. It's an inhospitable place, an emotional desert, where only economic victory is rewarded and where no excuses are allowed for failure. It's a humorless grim world. It could be the US of 2017 or the UK of 2021. We only know that Guilty Sinner must flee, become, as it were, a refugee, scouring the world for some place to lay his head, some haven from the economic concentration camp that his homeland always was. You might even think it was California in the 1990s. He had been given a set of answers from which no deviation is allowed, but he deviated anyway, and this meant exile. Where will he go? Who will recognize his humanity? We know that he stumbles into a strange new land. He struggles to understand it. Maybe it's too good to be true. It could be that he's living your life story now. We only know he is seeking freedom from religious and economic dogma. He must keep wandering till he can escape the claws of inflexible ideology and monetary triumphalism, if it's at all possible to escape.

This title has been replaced by the new title & cover: "Mental Illness Ain't for Sissies" - same great material, just a new cover

A lust-filled, teenage Jesus freak is slowly driven to distraction by the hot babes that inhabit his evangelical, Texas youth group. Unable, due to his strict adherence to the rules of chastity, to have sex, and unable, due to his lack of financial status, to attract the top-shelf women he craves, he is forced into being a b-actor in romance. He awaits his lucky break in the lottery of love. There is more than one surprise as the wheel of fate turns.The book was intended to be a kind of counseling manual by a one Marvin Godwin Plinkers of Lake Compromise, Texas. In responding the pleas of a besieged youth counselor who cannot figure out how to deal with the beta male orbiters that come to him for help, Marvin decides to write a series of lectures which contain all of the suppressed truth about these lost souls. However, the book quickly becomes half-confessional, a text in which seemingly dry treatises are interspersed with true romantic confessions. The lines between genres become hopelessly tangled.Marvin refuses to agree with either left-wing propaganda or right-wing propaganda regarding romantically unsuccessful men. He had himself been one of those lovelorn Jesus freaks who, at least seemingly, could not quite make it in any area of life. And so he is quite certain he knows what he is talking about and decides to reveal everything, no matter how embarrassing the truth turns out to be.The book begins with a letter in which Marvin attempts to deal with the youth counselor who has contacted him, but the body of the book quickly degenerates into a series of dating failures and didactic mini-treatises. A recurring theme in the book is the slow loss of innocence, both theological and sexual. The book is situated in the very-transitional time of the late 1970s and early 1980s. And because every ideological group wants to conveniently explain-away the existence of beta-male orbiters, the book becomes ruthless in its refusal to let anyone's self-serving narrative prevail.The book's universal message is that all our social bedtime stories are false. Life cannot be controlled by them, but surges forward, unwilling to ever be tamed by our belief systems. Love and sex will never be bow to human attempts to manage it.

Wage Slave is driven from job to job, from vocation to vocation, never finding stability or success for long. Although he is well educated, his mental and physical health are disastrous. Unable to get any career momentum, he is relegated to low-paying high-risk jobs for which he is temperamentally unsuited. He vainly trudges on trying to find ever-elusive stability and unattainable social acceptance. Driven further down by his insecurity and vulnerability, he is subjected to continual danger and humiliation and must use every resource available to make it from day to day. But during these long seasons of economic exile, amidst much isolation and frustration, there are moments of joy, adventure and deep satisfaction. Wage Slave is essentially disabled but unable to deal with the unwieldy and punitive disability system, hence he must work at odd ours and in strange locations that no confident person would tolerate. And yet Wage Slave keeps reinventing himself in hopes of finding an island of occupational peace in workplace environments filled with predatory sharks. His prayers for mercy go largely unanswered, but he does everything he can to keep faith alive.

Two desperate temp agency workers struggle to make rent in San Francisco. Their economic desperation drives them to specialize in working with clients who need short-term white-collar criminals to carry out their schemes. The perks are substantial, but the risks are high. Not only are the criminals being followed by federal agents, but the federal agents are being followed too.