The Supersonic Phallus

(coming in August)

When cub reporters Dean and Sam of the Sinai, Colorado Sentinel investigate UFOs seen over Two-Mile Mesa, they have no idea of what they’re about to face—or of what they’ll end up doing. The time is July 1947—the great flying-saucer scare, when thousands of Americans suddenly report seeing UFOs over every part of the country.

Dean is gay, but Sam (our narrator) is decidedly not! But as they interview witnesses and maintain high-altitude stakeouts, Sam begins to fall in love with Dean. Are the UFOs to blame? Is Dean merely the handsomest man Sam’s ever seen, or a space alien? And are the UFOs actually Russian aircraft out to steal U.S. atomic secrets?

The Air Force sends P-51 Mustang fighters to shoot down Sinai’s aerial invaders, even as the Government insists people are just seeing weather balloons. But one night, after a veritable supersonic phallus streaks overhead, Dean and Sam risk everything to let the world know the truth.

Smash-and-Grab Press (2025, paper, 148 pp. ISBN 979-8-9850215-7-8). Cover by Todd Engel.

The Holy Hugs of Father S.

This scathing story about predator priests begins in the spring of 1966. Father Schmidt is riding high, expecting to be promoted to pastor of Saint Jude’s, in Washington’s Maryland suburbs. Also, his choir is to feature in a documentary about the Second Vatican Council—and he’s driving a sporty new Plymouth Fury III.

Thirteen-year-old Jeff, about to enter a Jesuit prep school, is also riding high. Father S. takes a kindly interest in Jeff—until his interest takes a turn that changes both their lives. The Archdiocese deals obliquely with the situation, by indeed promoting Father S.—to the boondocks of southern Maryland. But there he finds other, likeminded exiles and, with the help of his new friend Father Robin, is soon exploiting more boys.

Meanwhile, Jeff, who happens to be gay, works to recover, helped by a promising friendship at his new school—until he comes up against more priestly intervention.

Father S. is based on one of the Catholic Church’s most notorious pedophile priests, Father Thomas S. Schaefer (1926-2009), my priest and confessor when I was a boy in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Smash-and-Grab Press (2024, paper, 160 pp. ISBN 979-8-9850215-6-1). Cover by Todd Engel.

The Midhurst Lashes

The Midhurst Lashes conflates and adapts as a screenplay the only two novels written by poet Algernon Charles Swinburne: the fragmentary Lesbia Brandon and what may be the best unreadable novel in the English language, Love’s Cross-Currents.

In books saturated with feeling (however perversely expressed), partly autobiographical, partly derived from De Sade and from Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses, supremely subtle (and yet operatic), Swinburne creates one of Victorian literature’s great characters, Helena, Lady Midhurst. Midhurst ruthlessly whips her daughter, niece, nephews and grandchildren into and out of affairs and marriages, crowning her manipulations by trying to secure—at any cost to others—the family title for her own great-grandson. Among the sufferers along the way is her grandson Redgie, who falls in love with a cousin only to find Midhurst intent on sending her away.

The Midhurst Lashes tells a devastating story of control, manipulation, pain, powerlessness, helpless surrender, ecstasy and love in a haut monde of play, rivalry and score-settling.

Smash-and-Grab Press (2023, paper, 148 pp. ISBN 979-8-9850215-5-4). Cover by Todd Engel.

My Hollywood Memoir
and Other Fiction

Four vignettes about America’s past half-century.

In My Hollywood Memoir, the grandson of a silent-screen star goes to Los Angeles to become a movie star himself. It’s 1972, and Kid Crusoe Wyatt parlays his contacts into a gay love affair and a starring role in his grandfather’s biopic—but will his fate be any different from Granddad’s? Sidestep, set in 1980s Ohio, explores how American elites manage to stay on top come what may, even as crack cocaine threatens Jonah Greene’s outsized success. Big Luck’s Ricardo is a 2000s Mexican immigrant whose sex-worker past stymies his citizenship application, until—after helping to game the California lottery—he realizes what he has to do. The mood darkens in the mid-2010s with Save the Max Man! as a family deals with a child’s health crisis by waging war on its medical insurance provider.
 

Smash-and-Grab Press (2022, paper, 232 pp. ISBN 979-8-9850215-2-3). Cover by Todd Engel.

That’s My Story

Two Tales

That’s My Story tells two tales inspired by my family history, one about the posse my great-uncle led to recapture desperado Frank Holloway after he broke out of the Vernon, Texas jail in 1922, and another about the national scandal provoked in 1935 by the discovery that my cousin Shorty Key was playing as a ringer ("Ted Key") on UCLA’s football team.

In The Last Posse, twelve-year-old Bing, visiting his Uncle Jim Groves, Sheriff of Texas’s Wilbarger County in 1922, is swept up in adventure as his uncle leads a posse chasing the famous outlaw Frank Holloway. They pursue him by car and on horseback across two states before breaking off on a private mission of revenge, to find the Eastern con men behind the theft of Jim’s father’s long-buried bones. Bing narrates his encounters with newsreel cameramen, an English lord, a biplane, a blue norther, his own murderous impulses and Manhattan’s historic (if illusory) “Edwards Estate”—not to mention a certain embroidered Mexican dress—in this Texas-sized adventure story inspired by real events.

The second tale—That’s My Story, based on UCLA’s notorious 1935 “Texas Ted” scandal—takes place in Beverly Hills, California. Jim Groves is living in a stately Holmby Hills “cottage,” providing security to the Raven brothers, rich Los Angeles developers and boosters of UCLA’s football team. Jim’s son, Bruins’ fullback “Texas Ted,” carries the team almost to the Rose Bowl before getting called out as a ringer. Determined to get to the bottom of things, Jim—Bing again accompanying him and narrating—traces the commotion to Oil King Cassidy himself, chief booster of the Bruin's archrivals, the USC Trojans. Noir mayhem ensues.
 

Smash-and-Grab Press (2020, paper, 232 pp., ISBN 978-1-7368333-9-1). Cover by Todd Engel.

A Family Romance

A Novel

This family saga sweeps through more than 40 years. The first part draws on my upbringing in Washington’s Maryland suburbs as a son of a White House correspondent for a national newsmagazine. We meet Nat and Viv Handler at their 1959 arrival in Washington. When he stumbles upon the untold story of President Kennedy’s womanizing, Nat sets out to report on it. But the more he tries to get the facts from the President’s sexiest mistress, the more he puts his job—and his marriage—at risk.

Then we meet Nat and Viv as students in Colorado during World War II. Viv’s involved with J.T.—her handsome bad boyfriend—when Nat begins courting her. It’s a scene of Swing Era dances, steamy backseats and rationed Coca-Cola, as J.T., dragging Viv and Nat along, works inexorably towards his fate.

Years later, in the 1980s, we follow Viv and Nat at the height of their careers through the course of a single day, living a busy life in New York City. Nat’s a magazine editor and Viv runs her own student-group travel business. Looking forward to the future, but inescapably aware of the past, they walk to work, negotiate their offices and office mates, solve crises, go shopping, see a play. Viv rescues an old friend, while Nat inadvertently brings disaster upon a colleague. Fortunately, in the end art reconciles everything.

Smash-and-Grab Press (2020, paper, 316 pp., ISBN 978-1-7330465-1-0; ebook 978-1-7368333-6-0). Cover by Todd Engel.

A Journal of the Plague Year,
and Other Plays and Adaptations

My Mad Russian

Three Tales

 A fable of the RV lifestyle in a Kansas Eden, complete with serpents!

The Wedding on Big Bone Hill

A Novel

After losing his lover and his job, Jack hits the road in an RV on a quest for Paradise, USA. He finds it in a bucolic Kansas state park where he takes a workamper job. But this Eden turns out to be almost as tricky as the original when the head ranger, soon to marry Donna atop Big Bone Hill, gives her father, Percy, his deputy, free rein over the park.

Percy’s conviction is that everybody tries to get away with something, but that anyone allowed to get away with anything will try to get away with more, and he (if he alone) can see where that leads—he being the poster child for getting away with nothing. His constant search for infractions keeps everybody on edge, including his widowed friend Maureen, Dennis (who runs the entrance booth), and the Beanblossoms, workamper entrepreneurs who introduce into Eden the shirtless Rick.

When a little boy goes missing the weekend The Wedding on Big Bone Hill is to take place, Percy takes on the lonely task of meting out justice—threatening tragedy in an otherwise ruefully funny celebration of an American microcosm.

In the bonus novella, Junkie, Indiana (originally published in 2016), Cordelia falls for Jordan, the older teenager who lives across the way in Shady Acres Trailer Park. But Jordan’s a junkie—like his cousin Adam, their mothers, aunt and a dismaying proportion of the population of Chuterville, Indiana. When Adam’s business model of dealing just enough drugs to keep himself and Jordan high begins to fail and Cordelia learns something that threatens the cousins, they try to shut her up—forcing her to take the only decisive action she can.

Smash-and-Grab Press (revised edition 2021, paper, 212 pp. ISBN 978-1-7368333-7-7; ebook 978-1-7368333-8-4). Cover by Todd Engel.

Queer’s Progress

A Novel

This autobiographical story of young love features Eduardo, Cuban-born college student and page at the New York Public Library (“just a page, not a whole book or anything”), plus Andrew—a young scholar new to town who falls in love with him—and Ned, older master of gay Manhattan.

As Andrew makes stumbling progress in pursuit of him, Eduardo flees from a pregnant hookup and his mom’s Harlem apartment to flop on his oldest friend’s floor, his best friend’s couch, in Andrew’s bed, at the West Side Y, on a patch of Central Park ivy and in a jail cell or two. Meanwhile Ned’s machinations—meant to kickstart his long-stalled literary career—churn on as Queer’s Progress races towards a classic inevitability in a tale by turns savage and urbane, lyrical and drily witty.

Smash-and-Grab Press (revised in 2023, paper, 200 pp. ISBN 978-1-7330465-3-4). Cover by Todd Engel.

BIO
 
I was born on a farm in western Colorado, earned English Lit degrees at CCNY and Columbia University, and currently live in the Midwest. Reach me at skm-author@protonmail.com.