Loaded guns and babies are like salt on a Twinkie. It makes no sense.​

​Keeping with tradition, Jessica Cooper's birth is brief, a girl they name Diana who somehow favors Doug in her soft features and slow blinking eyes. Scarlet’s pride vibrates like radiation. Her hovering applies visible strain on Doug as they move from the hospital to the house where she has commandeered the guest room and organized the baby paraphernalia into a series of stations. Some of Doug’s anxiety stems from Scarlet’s constant ability to discover the dozens of handguns he has hidden throughout the home.

​Partly due to Doug’s indifferent attitude and partly due to her mother’s joy, Shorty surrenders any notions she had of keeping Scarlet a reasonable distance from the baby. With the first week and the anxiety and the mood swings and the steady march of singular experiences, she realizes that raising babies is one of the few areas Scarlet knows better than her daughter. Shorty encounters the first heartbreaking love of her life in the child she nurses in the amber lamplight near the window where she prays and time travels.

​The beautiful burden of it has shaken her foundations and for several weeks after, she feels imbalanced and she confesses this to Sean when he sees the child for the first time. As she expected, he thinks she should consult an expert but he also points out the self awareness it takes to recognize this sort of problem from her side of the mirror. Many people don’t see this sort of thing coming so he accuses her in jest of practicing Buddhism in secret.

​Nessa says babies stink. She likens them to hamsters. She tells Sean that children are unnecessary and detrimental to actual happiness. Worse yet, their parents’ most infuriating traits live on in the mimicry of their children, a trend she fortifies with anecdotal tales of her youthful rebellion such as the time the female members of her family organized an intervention to persuade Nessa to shave her armpits before her sister’s wedding. She refused of course and her grandmother blamed her mother’s previous defiance, the year she brought her college girlfriend home for Thanksgiving, a phase from which Nessa’s mother has—since her divorce—yet to escape.

​After a prodding over any unfortunate behavior he might have inherited from his father, Sean fails to find any resemblance to him or to his grandfather. He does mention that he and his grandfather’s father found anarchism independent of one another but he cautions that his grandfather was a killer like the Towers that followed him. All but Sean. What follows is an extensive interview over Fox’s life and tribulations along with Sean's experience in searching for Fox’s story. The tale enthralls her. The Russian Revolution. Union activism. Matawan, Tennessee. She insists Sean resembles him in his want to help people. She encourages him to reflect on the other Towers. They must share a thread of charity. Sean reminds her that her complaint is based on deleterious traits. She swears charity can be as deleterious as violence or lies.

The back of the house faces the open expanse beyond the city, the horizon spiked with industrial towers shouldered by a distant hill where the subdivision clings like crystals in a dark geode. The wind encounters little resistance as it races the shape of the land and finds the back door where a whirlwind dances in perpetuity. Sean stands in the spiral, engaged with the sky, struggling to scrub his thoughts.

​He’s toured the house littered with evidence numbers and consumed by the absurd fossilized time inherent in all crime scenes, even the dust in the air seems arrested, set aside. He saw where they found the baby tucked next to the toilet in the downstairs bathroom. They found Shorty’s body over the bathroom threshold. She took two rounds, one to the gut and one through the heart. She had fired several rounds down the hallway that emptied into a living area where Doug Galloway sent return fire and died bent over the arm of a recliner. Doug bled from several wounds but the destruction of his pudendal artery proved fatal.

​Both bodies were found nude. The struggle preceding the firefight started in the bedroom, broken furniture, broken glass, torn clothes, blood. There’s a bullet hole in the wall near the baseboard, the only bullet fired outside the hallway. He’s reminded of how Big Donny Higgins threw him into a wall at juvie. He’s reminded of Shorty’s deceptive physical strength. Sean worries his initial speculations will lead to wondering other things. Did Galloway try to rape her? Did he succeed? Who fired the first shot? Where was the baby? Had he threatened the child?

​His emotions swell. Gravity tightens its grip. He sits on the concrete step, shivering in the wind, faltering under the weight. Memories of his mother’s face throb behind his eyes, the eyes of a grown man, not the headstrong child she struggled to understand. He can’t remember if he cried at her funeral. He arrived too late to join the family in pews directly below the pulpit so he stood at the back, leaning against one of the pillars supporting the church balcony. He never grieved Samantha the way he grieves Shorty. No agony. Just a few trivial regrets. The tonnage of his regrets for Jessica Cooper is too heavy and too tragic. His irrational urge to protect her has backfired and punctured him.

​He sees her. He sees her eyes. They ride the chord across the trajectory of that Philosophy of Law classroom, dollops of earth tone more satisfying than anything he will ever know. They’re gone now and nothing he can do will bring them back.

Buy River of Blood on Amazon in both digital and paperback. www.amazon.com/dp/B087B36ZF2

This brutal, philosophical crime novel spans generations in its examination of family myth, cycles of violence, and corruption and racism among police departments. O’Fuel (That Night Filled Mountain) traces the life of Sean Tower, a restless young man from a family of cops, from a childhood fascinated by violent comic books to years spent hoboing across America to eventual deployment as a police officer in an unnamed American city. Sean slowly develops a moral philosophy that places him at bloody odds with a police department infested with racketeers and white supremacists.

O’Fuel’s ambitious novel is an impressionistic swirl of past and present, especially in its first half, as passages of vivid family lore alternate with present-tense accounts of Sean’s childhood. The prose surges with anger, despair, and invention, but it’s not easily approachable. O’Fuel vaults among timelines and perspectives. Dialogue is scant, and at times the prose loses clarity as it strains for poetic effect: “Spooky details cloned in the repetitive scenes of spontaneous destruction will produce macabre moments of déjà vu.” O’Fuel’s scenes often fall into present-tense summary and focus on characters’ internal experiences, skimming through action that might have had greater impact if dramatized.
​
For readers willing to disorient themselves in O’Fuel’s sweeping and outraged narrative, the novel offers accounts of war, policework both bizarre and mundane, life on the road, suicides and cop murders, and, eventually, the pulpy violence readers might expect from a crime thriller. Even then, O’Fuel bucks simple convention by penning the climax as a lengthy, ruminative colloquy, the text stripped of quotation marks, the scene feverish and unsettling. This ambitious exploration of systemic violence and moral philosophy has a lot to offer for fans of dense, cerebral crime fiction.

​

I almost talked myself out of writing this post, a piece describing the work that has led up to this moment, the release of my new novel River of Blood. It has taken so long to get here. Years. Aside meeting my wife and the birth of our two children—to whom I’ve dedicated the novel, it became the preeminent detail in my life from the moment the vague idea came to me in 2015. Like that black t-shirt that somehow always reappears in the closet for a decade, slowly changing from pristine pitch to vintage charcoal and fraying seams, the story tumbled through my thoughts and hounded my weekends as I scrambled to meet my self-imposed deadlines for serializing the damn thing on this site.

That’s right. After the first seventy-some-odd pages, I began serializing this story here before I even finished, before slaying the many plot monsters I had conjured. A harrowing journey for certain.

I remember the first few days of writing when I failed to recognize the possibility that this thing could escape the tenuous restraints I had imagined for it.

It will be a short examination of free will and determinism. A novella in the vein of Jim Harrison.

The beast outwitted me. A story I originally estimated could land at a hundred pages left a crater in my life over five hundred pages wide. How the hell did this happen? I had the basics of the story strung with perfection and exactitude. A crystal beginning, middle, and end, only the tiniest of details needed to bind them and release it into the either. How could I have known the reproductive possibilities of those details? The collective genitalia of these details whizzed like servos and the hutch of my virgin cuniculture burst.

It took me five years to gain control.
​

It’s too much. Too much for me to process all at once. The kids and I have only been in the house for a month. I’ve only known Jim for a month longer than that. You all warned me. You all heard the rumors. But I wouldn’t listen. He was everything. Kind. Dashing. Good job. This beautiful home he refurbished with his own hands endeared him even further. He and the kids hit it off as if we had been together for years. He’s a gifted storyteller—that should have been my first clue! Karen, my oldest, loved his yarn about how the upper floors of the house burned in the sixties when two star-crossed teenagers tipped over a lantern in the attic. “They died in a fire as hot and tragic as their love,” he would say. So disgusting now to remember it. But that’s where it all connects, you see? I get it. It’s implausible. Impossible. A mental fabrication. A figment of the trauma. But that can’t be! I saw her! The alarm woke me and she was there under the smoke detector above the kitchen table. Her face besmirched with char, hair burnt to the scalp, bra and panties still smoldering. I screamed in harmony with the siren but as Jim and Karen crashed naked and panicked through the door from the garage, she vanished, leaving me in the vaporous shock of his betrayal, my ears ringing in a jagged, deafening silence.

​What’s the goal, though?
Later, back in the confines of the garage, Ollie and Hicky and I drank. This foray into their mission had fostered a pinch of camaraderie between myself and the crew. I had labored with them that night. I had participated. Now the beers had me curious about PLA aspirations.
You guys aren’t delusional as far as I can see. But you know these operations won’t stop wars or death. Any media attention you receive is one sparkle in a bucket of glass.
Ollie’s response felt rote.
Good argument. One that I’ve had with myself many times. Ya know, once I broke free of the violence, I stepped back and saw what I had done then I saw the consequential violence around me like ripples around rain drops.
Hicky shook his head at us. I did not come prepared for a poetry contest, fellas.
Then butt out.
You see, Tower, my guilt broke me. As far as I could see, the only way forward was an ironic reversal of sorts.
So you’ve performed some sort of metaphysical accounting of your sins and hope to alleviate your guilt by subtraction?
Sure.
What happens when you zero out?
Who’s to say I haven’t already, Tower?
You have done a lot. The LAPD armory. Those tanks in Russia…
And a fuckton more. Maybe enough to zero out. Maybe that’s why yer here. Maybe the violence owes me something now.
That’s a lot more anthropomorphizing than I’m comfortable with.
Old habits.
Look, I get it, Ollie.  As an endeavor to atone, I see how one might be tempted. But your enemy is colossal. Immense. Bigger than anything. Bigger than everything.
Hicky pointed the open end of his beer bottle at me. That might be the point, Tower.
I used to feel that way.
Ollie laughed at me. There’s a pile of dead cops that says you’ve felt that way recently.
This is not a debate I wanna have right now.
Hicky straightened himself and pointed the bottle at me again. You said the enemy is colossal, Tower. You’re right. But only out of dumb luck. The enemy is gargantuan only because the enemy is in your own head. It is your head, your mind. And we both know that one mind contains the entire universe. The enemy is not the state or any singular shitbag like Cruz. They are vines to be hacked down on the journey, my friend. I think maybe you know this. The proximate obstacles are hurting you right now is all.
Proximate obstacles? That’s some pretty heavy shit, Hicky. And here you thought you weren’t a poet.
I’m an empath. It’s a curse. He paused for effect. Please don’t kill me.
This sent Ollie into violent amusement that bent him at the waist.
Cute, I said. You’re real cute.