Publisher's Synopsis
Uses the techniques of speculative fiction and science fiction to create a dystopian vision of the near future in America. Here, most any kind of dissent is criminalized and individuals are routinely charged with terrorism offences. The L. A. Mercy Killer is incarcerated in the Bay of Frisco, a center for domestic terrorists, after the third terror has destroyed much of Los Angeles. Special Agent Orwell and Judge Dan believe the girl whose face you can't see was deeply involved in not only the Mercy Killer's crime, but, also, the massive terror attack on Los Angeles. In Part II of the novella, a flashback, we retrace the steps of the girl whose face you can't see prior to the third terror. Who is she and what does she represent? Did she know the L.A. Mercy Killer? Was she responsible for his crime and for her own? The conclusion of the novella is a chilling expose of how conformity and authoritarianism threaten freedom, imagination, language, life and limb. The L.A. Mercy Killer stands in the long tradition of dissidents who rage against the security state."The cryptic, poetic prose of Gessie's near-future novella requires slow, careful reading. A derelict ship in the Bay of Frisco houses the Center for Domestic Terrorists. Atheists, political dissidents, and privacy advocates are locked up in government prisons, buried as thoroughly as the cask of Amontillado. The L.A. Mercy Killer has just euthanized an old woman in a hospital and is being interrogated by the aptly named Special Agent Orwell. Orwell insists that he was working with the mysterious girl whose face no one can see; she's wanted in connection with an attack that destroyed Los Angeles. The girl may be real, or she may be just the spark of rebellion in a society steeped in demagoguery and authoritarianism. Gessie evokes a nightmare scenario of an Orwellian government under which justice, freedom, and equality are antiquated notions, and you can hear 'amendments of the Constitution snapping like tracheal bones...' The message is timely and pertinent." -Publishers Weekly, April 2017Dean Gessie is a Pushcart-nominated author and poet who has won multiple international prizes. Dean won the Angelo Natoli Short Story Award in Australia and the Half and One Literary Prize in India. Dean also won the Bacopa Literary Review Short Story Competition in Florida, the Enizagam Poetry Contest in Oakland, California, the Two Sisters Short Story Contest in New Mexico and the After Dinner Conversation Short Story Competition in Arizona. Elsewhere, Dean won the short story contest at the Eden Mills Writers Festival in Canada and he was selected for inclusion in The Sixty Four Best Poets of 2018 by Black Mountain Press in North Carolina. In addition, Dean won second prize (of 2000+ submissions) in the Short Story Project New Beginnings competition in New York and his short story made the shortlist (of 2800+ submissions) for the Alpine Fellowship Prize in Stockholm, Sweden.
