Launched This Week: The Department of Magic

It’s hate at first sight.

Jasmine Farah and Rocco di Angelo are competing for the same job in a dusty office in a secret Federal agency run by the mysterious, menacing Jefferson Davis Crawley – “Creepy” Crawley, as he’s known.

When Crawley is murdered in front of them after their first day on the job, Jasmine and Rocco are left to figure out who killed their new boss, and exactly what a job in the so-called Department of Magic entails. And magic, it seems, is nothing like it seems in children’s books; it’s dark and bloody and sexual.

What follows is a nightmare gallop through a world of ghosts, spooks, vampires, demons, and the minions of South American and Voodoo gods hell-bent on destroying the world and subjugating all America in the year 2012.

Only Rock and Jazz, in the company of a ragtag team of urhobos – homeless guardians of the District of Columbia– can prevent it by resurrecting “Goddess America” in a mystical ceremony on the Fourth of July, as the story reaches its bittersweet and unforeseen climax.

Available now at Amazon:

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Rod Kierkegaard Jr's first novel, a dark social satire set in the America of 2049, is a fast-moving, sexy, visionary comic satire in the tradition of Philip K. Dick and Petronius' Satyricon. Obama Jones and the Logic Bomb draws the reader into a randy, pleasure-seeking, plugged-in future world in which political correctness is the law of the land and a new Ice Age has turned the Green movement Orange.

 Devastated by the loss of his beloved wife Kim, Obama Jones, a mild-mannered bureaucrat, sets off on a desperate quest through cyberspace to rescue her from the clutches of a compulsory, lifelong UN witness protection program. Along the way he encounters ruthless diplomats, terrorist cells, talking apes, deadly seductresses, shapeshifting robots, body-snatching aliens, civil war in Central Park, God, a strutting supercool babe-magnet alter-ego named Joyful Kalinga, and the Truth: about Kim; about the purpose and fate of Humynkind, and about Obama's own astonishing true nature.

On sale at Amazon (Kindle Edition) now.


Read an excerpt from the novel:

Shooting Stars

My first graphic novel profiled in a 2008 review I only recently discovered here:

1: Stranger Than Fiction

This is the story of my life. A life lived behind a mask. A life lived in books and desperately dull for the most part. There is now, I believe, a Facebook page dedicated to the "Most Interesting Man in the World", the mythical figurehead of a Mexican beer advertising campaign. I am his bipolar opposite, his boring twin, the least interesting man in the world. I've hardly ever had any real adventures or traveled much (by modern standards), barely known anyone famous or slept with many women. Other than my marriage to a truly remarkable one, there's been nothing out of the ordinary about my life in any way.

Except, possibly, for the fact that I'm a vampire.

2: Blood: Delicious Hot, Disgusting Cold

I've decided to live-blog the story of my life, which means I'll be writing the rough, or "vomit"-draft, online from now on. I suddenly feel as if I'm typing in a glass shop-window like "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter". Please feel free to make any comments, story suggestions (obviously, I feel unconstrained by such things as facts; why should you be?), or typo corrections you like. I shall ignore them, of course, but it will at least give both of us the illusion, however brief and baseless, that someone is actually reading our words in this empty, echoing, lonely void.

3: Drools & Don'ts for the Modern Vampire

I suppose at this point I should pause in my sputtering narrative flow to correct a few modern myths about vampirism. It is in no way a glamorous existence. Quite the reverse; it is a degrading and highly inconvenient curse. Let's consider the following myths, which I see retailed constantly in films and TV shows and books, one at a time:

4: How to Cheat on Your Bloody Diet

The moment I make friends with a woman, as Henry Higgins might say these days, a flurry of embryonically flirtatious messages begin to fly back and forth between us (in fact, emailing is in itself rather like two embryos communicating by Morse code from the womb, isn't it?) And then at last, after my words have made Vera cry and "LOL" and shed her every inhibition, though like all the rest of her generation she obviously possesses very few of those indeed (her drug regime, which I look forward to sampling at some future date, consists of four years on Paxil and Abilify), the inevitable subject arises: my wife.

5: Wag Dogs Tail

"Vera:


You write:


'I thought you were supposed to be such a great writer. This is crap.'


Cruelty is one of a woman's most attractive traits. Wanton cruelty, however, is not. And I find your opinion of my writing skills, however accurate, wantonly expressed. You go on to say:

6: In Love and War

I have just made the foolish error of showing what I've written so far to my wife. I have literally no idea what possessed me. I suppose I thought she'd just give me a pitying look at the end--so I'd have an excuse to abandon a project which, quite frankly, is not turning out so well.

7: Inglorious Turds

Such is the perverseness of human nature, that after that hellish night, I was actually impatient to go off to Vietnam, a prospect that had blighted my high school years like a ravening black beast up till then. Now it was an inevitability, time seemed to drag. 

8: The Muse of Memory

But it was not to be the last I saw of Randy Blanchard. In fact, it was he who was inadvertently responsible for curing me. However temporarily.

First they flew me to Camp Drake, then after there was a big influx of Mas-Cals, to Camp Zama. Zama was the cushiest military post in Japan, more like a big country club than an army base. It wasn't far from Tokyo and supposedly even had its own 18-hole golf course. 

9: A Wrong Number

"I was born in the desert." Thus began the comic strip I'm best-known for, "Rock Opera". Lacking the knack of Tristram Shandy to precisely recollect the instant of his own birth, I've always seen my own as a long, slow, amnesiac journey from the shadows; from a void, a desert of nothingness, into light and noise. And of course, pain. Originally "Rock Opera" was a short story, then when it was published as a cartoon in the "Unicorn Times", a local underground newspaper here in Washington DC, I changed it to third-person and deleted the reference to my tail. Later I restored the line, "They amputated my tail" to the reissued version in Heavy Metal Magazine (also changing it back yet again to its original first-person) to emphasize the character's alienness.

10: In the Beginning Was the Word

Who was Angel Deprez? A little black girl who stood outside my window. My screened bedroom window at the barracks was framed in galvanized corrugated tin siding, which meant that it was possible to slide objects out through the slats and onto the ground outside. This also meant that green geckoes and bugs, principally mosquitoes and columns of ants, could also easily enter the room. I remember that on days when I couldn't go out and play, Angel and I would stand there for hours solemnly passing objects back and forth through these holes like Pyramis and Thisbe; rocks, twigs, animal bones, small toys like melted plastic cowboys or doll's heads.

11: The Dying Season

The day we returned home to America (the British never refer to the "United States"), I started school. And entered Hell.

Actually, I quite liked the school part. I was a very sociable child, and since I already knew how to read as well as (or perhaps better than) our teacher, Miss Harriet, my workload was scarcely onerous. But the place was a bedlam of contagion. I caught cold after cold, then a flu which turned into chronic tonsillitis. Just before Christmas I had to ungero a traumatic operation to have my tonsils removed.