Five excerpts of my spy spoof entitled FEAR IS A HOLLOW VERB have now been published in the following venues. It is a sprawling, incomplete novel that if I worked at making it like I want it, would take years and years of work. Research is the biggest expenditure of energy.
The novel takes place in 2006 during the height of the Iraq War and the larger Global War on Terrorism, and is about an American spy Maria Gravelle who has been kidnapped by rogue Russian spies. She has valuable information about Khuftullah, a jihadi propagandist highly positioned in an Islamic radical group hiding out in Tunisia and Mali in Africa. Gravelleās shop, a UK/USA think tank named INDICIA, and the Russians are competing to try to get influence over Khuftullah, or at least use him to gain information about the āRibat Al-Tanzih,ā or āfortified monastery of deanthropomorphismā which is one of the the Islamic radical groups that have proliferated across the globe after the rout of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Along the way we learn about the unusual private biographies of Khuftullah and the Russian spies. It is supposed to be somewhat of a mock on spy novels, not quite real, a parody of Tom Clancy perhaps. Itās also a fragmentary āhistoricalā novel about the now distant historical period of 2006.
These five excerpts represent just a small fraction of the novel manuscript I have thus far. I am grateful to Apocalypse Confidential, Fugitives & Futurists, and Misery Tourism for publishing them.
https://apocalypse-confidential.com/2022/04/08/chain-of-transmission/
https://apocalypse-confidential.com/2022/04/04/weekend-visit/
https://www.fugitivesandfuturists.com/fiction/codename-tarragon
https://apocalypse-confidential.com/2022/11/11/the-africa-shift/