9/11, Genre, and A World Without Boldness: Thoughts on why I wrote the City of Sand Trilogy

The dishonest thing to me, about City of Sand, is that someone called me a propagandist, in response to seeing the blurb. The dishonest thing is to think I did this for money. Yeah, if I wrote a story that didn’t mean anything to me, and it made me money, I would have done it a long time ago. The decision to write a story isn’t entirely about money. Advertisers think about money, and I am not raised in an advertising background. I was raised in the most anti-advertising school of thought. Books like American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, and Holy Terror by Frank Miller, and Machine Game’s Wolfenstein games are a couple reasons why I admire the anti-advertising viewpoint.

            People used to be able to appreciate more underground cult media, books, paintings, and grafitti in the inner city’s of New York or LA. It’s where Art, in its most transgressive, used to be. In the post 9/11 years, my old English professor, Les Harrison, once said, about TC Boyle’s the Hitman “9/11 ended stories like this.” I don’t believe him and my novels are an answer to his question.

(Second official cover for the second book, Jerusalem Ignited. This is AI but it took my words and ran with it).