My First Novel

My first novel Broken Under Interrogation is not a happy work.  It is violent, has been described as obscene, and depressing.  But so is War.  It takes place during an economic depression.  The only people “making it” in the rot belt hometown of the protagonist are drug dealers, pimps, theives, and the corrupt corporate police force paid to tamp them down.  It is a reality that we overlook on a daily basis, and a reality that Iraqis faced on a daily basis during the height of sectarian violence as they toiled to remain alive for another day.  During that period, the people in Iraq that were successful were the gangsters, the militias, the insurgency that fought against the Americans and fellow Iraqis for money, the cross border psychopath Al Qaeda members who built car bombs to send into crowded marketplaces in order to profit from the creation of chaos.

There are people in this world who want to see it burn.  They are possessed of chaotic minds, with an illogic.  Religion is a stabilizing force in the world, but the only thing these people want is to be in charge.  They sow chaos everywhere they go.  Because it is their order.

There is a story of a complainer in life who died and was cast into the pit of hell.  As he was falling, and the heat was searing his soul he cried out to God to save him.  Hearing his cry, God ordered the Angels to retrieve this poor sinner from Hell.  They lowered him an onion on a rope.  The man cried back, “An onion?”

In the hell of my novel, which is a gut wrenching path through the low roads of life, and the muck of the riverbottom - replete with a pimp named Catfish, I toss men an onion.  This comes in the form of a letter from the protagonist to his estranged father.  In the letter the protagonist tells his father that he loves him.  Humans have a choice.  We were not given this choice as a gift.  It is ours.  It is in us.  We manifest this choice through our actions.  The protagonist’s father suffered from the abuse of an alcoholic father who suffered from the abuse of an alcoholic father….ad infinitum.  The protagonist recognizes that his father broke the trend.  Through force of will he did not succumb to the ill treatment he recieved.  He did not become a son tyrannizing abuser.  And that is all we can hope for, that fathers accord their sons more care than they recieved.  That they teach their sons to be men in the old sense of the word, the provider, the caretaker, the defender of the weak, the oppressed, and guardians of their bond.

I have ceased being concerned with myself.  My garden is fertile.  Now I am reaping the harvest.  The time of small minds and smaller hearts is over.

Jeffrey M. Hopkins is the author of Broken Under Interrogation.  He is currently working on his second novel.