Our Lady Fetta and Other Tales

Our Lady Fetta opens in Portland, Me., and involves a small Hollywood estate with too many beneficiaries. The disposition of the will naturally carries the protagonist back to the Midwest and ultimately to the Southwest to reconnect with his former college classmates, one of whom acts as his attorney. The novels diverse settings include Halifax, Chicago, Mesa, Santa Feoand Tucson, where a couple of transplanted Mainers also figure among the heros allies. Sanctimony, greed, religiosity, acculturation, the preservation of natural habitats, and other topics are explored; in addition to commentary and ideas by Robert Louis Stevenson, Somerset Maugham, Carlos Castaneda, Jim Morrison, Bram Stoker, and William Peter Blatty. Jet-setters, one of the short stories featured in the book, centers on a hilarious two-year romp in the Samoan islands at the onset of the global AIDS crisis. Other notable tales include New America, in which the author proposes a simple but macabre solution to overcrowded, tax-draining prisons,nnamely, banishment aboard galleons; Cardinal du Jour, about a teenage boy who narrowly escapes being molested by a high-ranking priest; Louse Party, about an LSD party and the horrors of addiction and drug abuse; and House with Ghost, based on actual events, about a man suffering from spirit attachment, whose ghostly companion haunts the home in which he rents a room and drives him out of the house.