Afriation Phobia: A Psychophobic Novel,Used

Product Description This is perhaps the most unique novel you will ever read. It contains no conventional narrative. The voice that delivers the plot and its messages is the voice the main character constantly hears in his head. The voice constantly speaks in short imperatives, and often separates into two bickering voices. Presenting this mental condition requires secondperson writing, something rarely found in fiction. An afriation is an organization or institution that forces one to constantly associate with people one wouldn't choose for company. This novel's main character is not an easy person to like, but is very easy to empathize with. This mentally unsound individual has an excessive fear of 'afriats,' people we are forced to interact with via an afriation. As a result, he is often a homeless transient feeling forced into being either a trespasser or a vagrant. The 'voice' in our character's mind carries you with him hitchhiking on freeways, hopping freight trains, struggling with employment in a conventional afriation, sidestepping civilization, and going to jail. It follows his thought processes as tension leads to a mental collapse. This novel is more than a typical action fiction. It presents a unique and valuable insight into our social structure that is yet to be dealt with by social scientists, one that is based on the types of social interactions we encounter. From the Inside Flap CHAPTER ONE How many years too late are you? About ninety, wouldn't you guess? What year is this? Isn't it nineteen eighty already? Th at must be right, because you were born in fortyfi ve, and you've somehow managed to live for thirtyfi ve years. You're less than a hundred years too late anyway. You'd be hearing the clear voice of that stream trickling not more than forty yards from behind this fence. Of course, there wouldn't be any fence. Just you and the stream and a lot more of those fi r trees, cottonwoods, willows, and other saplings whose names you've forgotten or never known. Who could ask for better company? Th e sunset concert would be about to start, featuring that stream, accompanied by fi ddling crickets and the harmonies of a good many birds. Th eir songs would fi ll this canyon like an amphitheater. Instead, you have this unaccompanied bass drone of idling diesel locomotives. You'd have a lot to thank those quiet trees for, wouldn't you? Th ey'd provide shade during the hot months, a wind break during the rest of the year, and a log cabin over there near the wall of the canyon. If your cabin were already built, it would sure spare you from this mid September night's raw wind that's beginning to make you quiver as if you were riding on an open fl atcar. Th at grove of trees would be donating plenty of dead wood to keep your fi re going all winter. You could just stay put and ignore the bite of this wind that's trying to warn you and the birds it's time to migrate. Of course, all them fi nefeathered, fairweathered birds would leave this canyon once the last of the chokecherries, rose hips, huckleberries, and crab apples that have been keeping them and you alive are gone. Richard Bird Baker But you'd stay here without them if you could manage to pull a fi sh or two from that stream and kill a furbearing critter once in awhile for its meat and hide.... Cut it out. Do you really think you could survive a winter in these mountains? Or in any other wilderness? Probably not today. But maybe you could've ninety years ago. A lot more men had wilderness survival skills in the late eighteen hundreds. Either you'd have acquired some of them yourself or you'd be dead by now. That's probably it; you'd be dead. You might as well be, anyway, for you'd soon be chased out of here by the fi rst crew that arrived with the dynamite to shape the fl oor of this canyon to the will of the railroad company. No, you wouldn't be dead. You'd probably have just crossed that stream and erected a small leanto in the woods a m