Here’s the synopsis. If there is anywhere else I need to post it, let me know. By the way, I want people to know I started this story sixteen years ago and have been writing and rewriting it every since. I wrote over five hundred thousand words and have trimmed it down to just under two hundred thousand. Obviously, this was well before Cormac had the bright idea to write a novel about the apocalypse. On the bright side, while there are some basic similarities in plot, there are many more differences and to be frank, my novel is much more ambitious.
Synopsis:
On April first of the year 2045, the world as we know it comes to an abrupt, apocalyptic end. Not with a bang or a whimper, but with psychotic laughter and screams of terror, the results of a nearly simultaneous worldwide outbreak of insanity dubbed “Apocalyptic Stress Syndrome” by a famous scientist on CNN Worldwide. The intolerable stress of living in a world bedeviled by wars, poverty, pollution, disease, and crime finally triggers a “species-specific” evolutionary reaction that turns ordinary people into homicidal maniacs. Billions die in the chaos, destruction, and violent riots and rampages. In a matter of days, civilization is in ruins.
Those who survive the continuing mass murder and devastation, people like profane, rugged children’s book author and former celebrity child revelator, Azaziah (known as Zaz) Meshach Whitfield (pen name, Henry Prince) and his precocious six year old son, Uriel, are forced to endure horrors never imagined by humankind (but lovingly detailed by this writer), including their own attempted murder by Zaz’s wife and Uriel’s mother, Solana, a confrontation that ends in her death.
After a few weeks of hiding out in their swank, secluded home in the hills outside of Austin, Texas, Zaz and Uriel leave on a perilous, nightmarish, and surreal odyssey to Boulder, Colorado in hope of reuniting with Zaz’s daughter, Jenny, and his first wife and childhood sweetheart, Bella. After their car breaks down on a forgotten Kansas backroad and they get caught in a violent thunderstorm, they find shelter in what they believe is an abandoned farmhouse. As it turns out, another person has sought shelter in that same house: a lovely sane but traumatized thirtyish housewife named Pyrrha Morrow.
Zaz discovers quickly that Pyrrha is as pious as he is profane. Their relationship, a wild and uninhibited variation of Bogie’s and Hepburn’s rough and tumble voyage on the African Queen, accelerates beyond their capacity to understand their overpowering instincts. After barely surviving an attack by a pack of ferocious dogs made feral by hunger and abandonment, the trio leaves the farm and continues their amazing and increasingly perilous journey. Along the way, they are joined by a comical futuristic scarecrow, Abed Forthnight. After a series of violent and dangerous confrontations and Zaz’s near blinding in an explosion, they reach Boulder. Zaz’s final challenge is to rescue kidnapped Uriel from the clutches of Nebu Chad Nezzar, former U.S. Senator and the leader of a bizarre religious cult called Gilead.