Dysfunction Stories

This is the sequel to The Great Gatsby. Everybody in America knows the story. In 1922, a tragic chain of events in the midst of America's Jazz age culminates in the slaying of Jay Gatsby on his West Egg estate. However, the story didn't end there. In 2025, the domino effect of secret schemes, conspiracies, and cover-ups stemming from Gatsby's death have culminated in modern Los Angeles, where, after a highly publicized trial, diamond billionaire Thomas Pritchard, is acquitted of conspiracy and murder. Upon his return home, Thomas finds that his wife, Yasmin, and his two daughters, Amy and Skye, have entered a contract to take part in The Fame, a reality show about their lives. During filming, Thomas' past actions bear fruit, and his enemies, including an international drug cartel, as well as the heirs to the all-powerful Buchanan Family, begin to reveal themselves on and off screen. All four members of the Pritchard family must navigate the power plays and schemes of all these factions, all the while cultivating public facing personas for The Fame. The Pritchard family is highly dysfunctional, and every member is delusional, narcissistic, and vain. However, these may be the traits necessary to survive in an upside down world of plots, counterplots, glamour, sex, and betrayal, where the stakes of gossip, back-biting, and scheming, are a matter of life and death.

Nine-year-old Trey's lonely, sad life as a fatherless misfit is changed forever when the new preacher's kid, the indomitable Charley, arrives. Everyone around Charley sees him as tragically handicapped. Not so Charley himself, who lives life to the full and pulls everyone around him along, starting with Trey. Watch them grow through challenges into young manhood and beyond. This is a revised and somewhat condensed version of this story. It started out life as a short story but its characters just took hold of me until it grew into what you have at hand. The characters and settings are an amalgam of a lifetime of experience, sometimes intense, of all sorts of people and places. In themselves, however, they are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real persons, places or events, other than what is clearly public knowledge, is coincidental. If you're looking for sex in every paragraph, you need to look elsewhere.

If life were a debate session, we would be required to choose a side and promote and defend the ideas that only support the position of our chosen side. In a debate setting, evidence which enhances the position of the opponents must be ignored, challenged or destroyed no matter how valid it might be. Life is not a debate session though, and treating it like one leads humans to create divisions among themselves, divisions that do not promote the quality of their existence. To the contrary the divisions create close-mindedness and rivalry among the people. A person will then be more concerned about the origin of a certain idea than the truth in it. A decent idea that comes from an opponent is then rejected even though it might have promoted the welfare of humanity. Beyond the Shell challenges the reader to embrace an investigative, objective perspective on assumptions and questions about life and then applying what is sensible for the improvement of personal and collective well-being