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.