With each new book, publishers and agents ask the author to write a prospective blurb—the promotional text you find on the back of the book jacket. Here’s what I put together for Exit from America.
“In this mad and crazy world they’re the only ones who are sane!”
“At the flashing red light—take the exit to freedom and survival.”
Exit from America is a revved-up, character-driven urban tale set in contemporary San Francisco—and a society on the brink of disaster. Centered in that sweet spot between commercial and literary fiction, and barreling straight through the junction of thriller and psycho-drama, Exit from America portrays five disparate souls trying to escape the collapse before they are buried in its ruins.
When Doyle Mere visits San Francisco following the death of his wife, he enters the orbit of an atheist saint, James Wayman, his wife, Mavis—a Gestalt therapist—and her artistic patient, Fay Flood, a manic-depressive struggling to raise her precocious daughter, Teejay.
At first barely aware of one another, the characters gradually form an unlikely twenty-first century family bound by love, respect and a commitment to find a better life together. Teetering around them is a bankrupt state sinking under the weight of economic, social and environmental exhaustion. One by one they manage to free themselves from the burdens threatening to submerge them, and together they make their way north to Salt Spring Island, a paradise on the far shore of the Salish Sea.
Exit from America is like Logan’s Run set on board the maiden voyage of the Titanic as it might be told from deep inside One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. At the end of the journey, Exit from America leaves you with two essentials you’ll need in your personal emergency kit: a road map to freedom and survival, and the desire to live another day.