I’ve intentionally kept Intoxicology Report ad-free for five years because I don’t want my opinions or your support to be in any way beholden. 

My books, however, I sorta do want to sell (!)

In my halcyon days, when I used to number drug dealers among my coterie, I learned two of life’s fundamental lessons:

1. If you give away the first hit and people like it, they will come back for more and the second time around, they will actually give you money for it. And if they like it even more, they will keep coming back until they are foaming at the mouth; they will call you in the middle of the night and knock on your door if you don’t answer your phone.
2. Drugs are bad for you.

‘The Jinx Fragment’: The First One’s Free

So, using that same life lesson, but applying it to something that is actually good for you—reading a book—I have released the first chapter of my Detroit-based novel ‘The Jinx Fragment’ free of charge, online, at thejinxfragment.com

After that, at a fee of $3 dollars per chapter, I will release the chapters once per week for 20 weeks until the story is all told.  Then I will publish ‘The Jinx Fragment’ in a hardcover format.  In the meantime, the lifeblood of the story is author/reader interaction, and there are plenty of places on the website where you and I can discuss the story as it unfolds and as the plots twists and meanders through the grime and grit of downtown Detroit.  You can discuss it among yourselves, too.

Those who read and like Chapter One—and trust that I didn’t fuck the rest of it up—have the option of buying in bulk—an all-in-one purchase at $20 for all 20 chapters—saving you a considerable sum over the long haul.  Even so, you will still get only one chapter per week as they are released, so there will be no spoilers.  You’ll get a voucher that will allow you to download the chapters as they are released.  But you will also be able to purchase the print copy at a discount and will automatically receive a thank-you ‘Jinx Fragment’ poster signed by me and the illustrator, my son Jesse.

Each chapter, and the print version of the book, will also be illustrated by Jesse, who has a supernatural gift of his own.

Unnatural Detroit, Naturally…

‘The Jinx Fragment’  is, in fact, a supernatural story set amid the decay and decadence of Detroit, borrowing elements from classic horror stories and placing them in the hands of a couple of inner-city teenagers. It was written for young people like them, but also for the sort of young dude I was and who you might have been too—the kind who loves to read, who loves characters and words and otherworlds where the supernatural becomes natural.

I still dig these kinds of books today, and I’m betting a lot of you do too.

There are plenty of brutal truths about Detroit in ‘The Jinx Fragment’, but they are not glorified.  Rather, the glory presented  is found in hope and transcendental power, which is what will save Detroit in the end, and will become (I hope) the last life lesson that any of us needs to learn.

Excerpt from ‘The Jinx Fragment—Chapter 1: Casket Sharp

“…Overhead, as the moon quivered in the gauzy purple sky, another man suddenly strode into the fray.

Young G was the first to see him—the exaggerated steps, the loping gait, the arms swinging with confident, feminine flourishes. The man was dressed in a white dress suit with the front part of the coat cut away; in back, tapered white tails fell nearly to the ground. His neck was done up in starched wing collars and white bowtie; his face was the color of dried plaster, his hair was shimmery with pomade, combed straight back and decked with almond blossoms; energetic tendrils fell to the middle of his back. His beard, also greasy with hair gel and even blacker, was absurdly trimmed into a tapered slash-shape reaching from his left ear, through his lips, and ending below his right ear.

He was dressed, as the poor folk in these urban interstices liked to joke, ‘casket sharp’—the way you looked after the undertaker finishes with you…”