Books
In the Land of the Lotus Eaters
Syd Fix is in a fix. He has a serious illness that causes him great pain. To find relief he has become a regular visitor at an opium den in New York City’s Chinatown, hidden underground in a maze of tunnels.
The head of the opium den is Linn Phan, a Chinese woman who is not what she first appears. Neither is her older brother, Sam Phan, who owns and runs a small herb and ginseng store that fronts for his real business—white sex-slave trafficking.
Syd’s beautiful young wife, Alba adores him although her bisexual tendencies sometimes surface. Once a model, she is now a flight attendant for Alitalia. We meet her as she accompanies Syd’s rapacious billionaire father, Creighton, who is reputedly a first-class seducer, on a junket across Italy. Back in Boston, Syd’s mother, Faith, a prominent neurologist and famous author, is about to be taken hostage by a psychopathic prison inmate.
The story takes readers on a breathless journey from New York City to Venice, Hong Kong to Russia, and finally to a peaceful island of Lotus Eaters. On this path Syd meets Veronika “Nika” Trelenko, who introduces herself as one of Sam Phan’s slaves. The beautiful Russian, once an orphan in Chechnya, is in fact a top KGB assassin on the hunt for Syd, her target. She becomes Syd’s unlikely ally in a complex and fast-moving story that culminates in a harrowing shoot-out under the streets of Chinatown.
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Doubling Down: Two Novellas, Two Short Stories
This superb collection exhibits author Frank Wolak’s strange, unforgettable characters in stories both long and short. “Glass Eye,” a novella, tells of late-in-life love. Aging Simon Morgan unexpectedly finds a lover to replace his beloved Marlene who died many years before. His new love is exotic, beautiful and mysterious. Simon, now besotted, worries—has he found her too late and will her manipulative ways lead him to danger?
The collection’s first short story, “The Shortcut,” finds Sam Ames desperately trying to get to Grace, the wife he adores who is dying of cancer. Standing in his way is a flash flood. His struggle is to survive the waters, but will he morph into a “Lamplighter,” one who ushers the dying to the afterlife?
In “The Author,” spiteful Morris Graggle, a famous author, is pitted against film location scout, Jennifer Marvel. About to break through as a director, she needs Graggle to agree to an option of his book. This leads to a highly entertaining game they play of gottcha … and gottcha again.
“Black Marvel,” the second novella, tells of a heroin kingpin and his enchanting Asian underling. The duo is pitted in a bullet-ridden tug of war against a group of opioid painkiller addicts under the spell of the kingpin’s erotic playmate. The infatuated men include the creator of a mysterious black-marble sculpture. The psychotic dealer lusts for power and is determined to grab it by having the men seduced, enslaved … or murdered.
A Magnet for Misfortune
“A Magnet for Misfortune” blends elements of a memoir, historical fiction, drama and supernatural realism.
Opening in a hazy limbo-like afterlife, a voice commands a lost soul, to “Begin.” This simple instruction leads our protagonist to retell the story of his life endlessly—as if he still lives it.
A weak and sickly child, he develops into a sensitive adolescent who at age 17 is seduced by the older sister he adores. This prompts him to flee his parent’s house for a northern city where he struggles to find meaning in life. Thirty years later he returns to his mother’s home for what he expects to be a short visit. But disaster follows. His father commits suicide and the narrator is trapped by a new set of responsibilities plus newly diagnosed cancer.
During treatment, he meets a Haitian doctor he finds irresistible. Too bad in that she and her great aunt, a powerful Voodoo Mambo, conspire to murder him and his sister. Their allies in the diabolical plot are three witches who drag souls to their retribution in hell.
Our narrator looks for redemption through his selfless action on September 11, 2001, when in spite of acrophobia he attempts to walk cross the George Washington Bridge to help at the WTC site. The voice that initially commanded him to “Begin,” moves forward in the story with orders to “Continue.” He does, but he tires and falters, driving the suspense, conflict and resolution posited in this haunting tale.
