Category Archives: novel

Confessing to Sister Sparkle at St. Origen’s

With the announcement that the Trump administration is banning the barbarous practice of transitioning children, I thought I would share another excerpt from my novel The Insurrectionist, out now from Freedom Letters press. Here, my journalist protagonist Ian Landquart, who has inadvertently ensnared his own daughter in an FBI probe of J6ers, attempts to repent at St. Origen’s Methodist Church in Chicago, where he meets the genderfluid Pastor Theo Wooster, AKA Sister Sparkle.

Above, X’s Grok tries valiantly to render Sister Sparkle based on my description below. Close, my digital friend, very close.

It had been years since he had prayed, not since his choirboy youth, before he rebelled against his parents’ religiosity. They’d been High Church Anglicans, all in for the smells and bells. He felt about under the pew ahead but found no kneeling rail. Should he cross himself?

He tried to remember the confession. We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness … provoking most justly Thy wrath and indignation.

Wrath and indignation.

“Ian, you shithead,” he murmured.

A hand with Crayola-blue nails rested gently on his shoulder, and he started. Looming over him was a busty, female-presenting individual in clown-white pancake makeup and a flamboyant outfit.

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Filed under Books, novel, The Insurrectionist

Mourning a hero frogman

In my new novel, The Insurrectionist, a plucky FBI frogman drowns in a rural pond during a raid on a family who protested (peacefully) during the Capitol Hill riot of Jan. 6, 2021. Read about the national day of mourning that follows.

The media frenzy peaked with the funeral of Frogman Jones. A blond female-presenting announcer with CBS’ Inside Edition began her coverage, “A sendoff for a hero, as FBI Frogman Jericho Jones was honored today at the citadel of democracy he died defending.” The viewing in the Capitol Rotunda drew a milelong line of mourners snaking through the streets. Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Kamala Harris, and President Biden knelt before a sarcophagus modeled after Lorenzo de Medici’s in Florence (draped in reclining marble nudes representing Twilight and Dawn, with Jones, wearing a Roman helmet with the visor up, gazing down on them).

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The Insurrectionist trailer

By popular demand, here’s the video my younger son and I put together to ballyhoo my new novel, The Insurrectionist.

The topic? A reporter pursuing a Jan. 6-related story ends up entangling two families—including his own—in an FBI investigation. The Insurrectionist, a darkly satirical novel, lampoons the news media and woke America.

Check out the novel here.

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Filed under Books, Elephants, Fiction, novel, Russell Working, The Insurrectionist

Dangerous new satire launches

Fiction! Disinformation! Run and hide, while there’s still time!

They told my agent my new novel could not be published. Too dangerous! You’re not allowed to question the Jan. 6 narrative, they said. It was the worst crisis since the Civil War, since the Visigoths sacked Rome. Delete your account.

He tried valiantly, but there were no takers, and we parted ways amicably. So I am publishing The Insurrectionist myself. And today the novel launches, in both paperback and ebook formats.

What’s it about?

Denied a promised posting in Paris, Ian Landquart, a reporter with the storied Chicago Bullet newspaper, is shunted off to a suburban bureau and assigned to redact racist language from the historical archives.

To salvage his career, he investigates an elephant-owning farmer who protested nonviolently on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021. But as Ian gins up an FBI probe, he learns that his progressive teenage daughter is dating the farmer’s conservative, gun-owning son—ensnaring the teens in the case.

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Filed under Books, Fiction, Free speech, Media, novel, Russell Working