This section of SENTENCE showcases my fiction, so you can decide if you like my style.

Lengthy excerpts from two of my novels are included, as well as the complete texts of two of my novelettes, several of my short stories, and a number of my fiction experiments.

I hope you enjoy them, and gain a better sense of who I am by reading them.

William S. Burroughs liked to quote Hassan i Sabbah, the eleventh century founder of the Ismaili sect known as the Assassins. "Nothing is true. Everything is permitted."

I cannot think of a more powerful statement.

If we accept that truth does not exist, that it would be dangerous if indeed truth did exist, in that if it did, its finality would lock us into the finite, into a closed box filled with clickings, then we are indeed blessed to live in a universe in which we may believe anything we want, a universe in which everything is permitted, a universe in which fiction, the exploration of lies, can be as true as truth itself purports to be.

I love fiction.

I love telling lies. I love the freedom of creating people who don't exist, putting them in rooms, dirty streets, rolling green countrysides, boats bobbing atop ocean swells, that do not exist, except in my day dreams, my typing fingers. Having them breath 'air' composed not of molecules, but letters.

Fiction is not reality. Anymore than a shimmer above distant sand is an oasis. Whatever reality is, assuming it does in fact exist, fiction cannot duplicate it. At its very, very best, the most fiction can do, with a rhyme, a wet daub of yellow orange pigment, a piano melody played in a minor key, is remind us of reality.

Whenever I've written a novel, I've had the experience of being in those rooms, smelling the cool freshness of that inked-in rain, perambulating within the limbs and clothes of those characters, male and female, I've created. I know what's in the pockets of their pants, when they don't. You live with them for months, sometimes years, eventually coming to have some feeling for, as in real life, even the bad ones, only you knowing her rush into his arms, the rages in the kitchen, train journey up the mountainside, will end, and at your hand. I wonder sometimes if characters, in the heat of a scene, spitting out their lines polished by someone else, ever sense, as a ghost, the man or woman quietly standing by the wall, hands folded, having them suffer through a scene again and again for what is, to them, still the first time.

John Gardiner said novelists are monks, and that's true. There's nothing more cloistered than a writer in a car, subway, plane, people-mover or elevator, listening not to the outside world but his or her own inward world.

Vladimir Nabokov got excited about his short story Lolita when it grew the 'wings and claws of a novel'. How true. We make the world not what it is, not what we want it to be, not what we fear that it is, but rather what it must be, in a novel.

A novel, like all writing, is a compensation. A pathway, in pages, to a different world. Not better, not worse, but different. All art gives us that glimpse, not of the better, nor the worse, but only, always, heroically, of the different.

The Birds Wake Up The Monkeys Opening of the Novel
Ralph Robert Moore reads the opening of Always Again

"Brains must be handled carefully or they will fall apart."
         --Julia Child, The French Chef Cookbook

Four hundred years ago, near the River Niger in northwestern Africa, a man and woman are pursued by a tribe with white T's painted across their foreheads, down the bridges of their noses.

In 1982, Peter Broome, living in comfortable retirement in Burlingame, California receives notice that Roger Moran and his wife Maddy have died. With the lawyer's notice are three boxes of out of focus photographs of Moran, and reel-to-reel and cassette tapes of Moran's day to day life over the past several decades.

In 1955, in North Hollywood, California, Broome first meets Moran after having married his only child, Claudia. Moran eventually tells Broome his life story, starting in 1928 when he first met Claudia's mother, Maddy, in San Francisco.

ALWAYS AGAIN is the story of two people, Roger and Maddy Moran, who believe they are reincarnated lovers. Old love in new bodies. Just as they are about to discover who they really are, and why they alone reincarnate, Maddy, in an assault, suffers irreparable brain damage. Roger must go through the rest of this reincarnation with his lover impaired, unable to provide the necessary clues to their multi-life existence to have it all make sense.

ALWAYS AGAIN was my first novel. I wrote it in Portland, Maine in 1983, after Mary and I moved there from California, in the top, third floor apartment of a multi-tenant house. There were dwarf doors on either end of the kitchen leading under the eaves, and windows in the bedroom so high you had to step up onto the seat of a chair to open or close them. Each day I'd drive Mary through the snow to her job, then come home, reheat the coffee, settle in an easy chair with a legal pad on my lap, and take off into the world of words.

ALWAYS AGAIN is unpublished at this point.

It Is Wet Here Opening of the Novel
Going Through Sylvia Daryl autopsies the woman he found
The Coldness People Walk Over Introduction of Sam Rudolph
Coffee Shop Tension Introduction of Sally Dolumbo; Daryl, Sam and Sally interact
Eight Legs, Three Cunts Daryl is woken up after his first date with Sally
Back Yard Talk Daryl and Sally's second date
In Someone Else's Apartment Daryl and Sally snoop through Sylvia Gold's things
"I Don't Want To Squeeze The White Part" Daryl accepts a dinner invitation from Sam
Big Dark Hole Sheriff Bob Cable enlists Daryl for a body transport
Ralph Robert Moore reads the opening of Father Figure

"...because you're mine."
          --Screamin Jay Hawkins

South of Anchorage, accessible only from a mud-rutted road off Seward Highway, lies the town of Lodgepole. After midnight, among the blueberry bushes of White Birch Park, a man crawls on top of a woman and begins making love to her. As her orgasm rises he puts his hands around her throat, shutting off her air. She struggles, not to stop him, but to stop herself from trying instinctively to pull his hands off her throat. As the top joints of his thumb meet at the front of her throat she comes, her cry of orgasm ricocheting around inside her forever.

Daryl Putnam, handsome, bookish, wakes up from a nightmare and decides to do something he hasn't done in years. Take a walk outside at night. Down in the park, at the lime green shores of Little Muncho Lake, he comes across the body of the strangled woman.

The next morning, at the coffee shop of the hospital where he works, Daryl meets Sally, a pretty, dark-haired girl. He's intelligent, she's outgoing. What they have in common is both are living lonely lives. Until today.

Also in the hospital coffee shop, shaking half a can of black pepper onto his tomato soup, is Sam Rudolph, a fiftyish man with eyes like an angry dog's, who has spent over twenty years quietly manipulating events in Daryl and Sally's lives to have this seemingly chance encounter among the three of them occur.

And who is actually a lot older than fifty.

FATHER FIGURE was written in San Antonio, Texas (Part 1) and Dallas, Texas (Parts 2 and 3). Mary and I would garden in the morning under the hot sun, digging holes and wiping the backs of our green gloves across our brows, then I'd climb the stairs to my quiet library and with dirty fingernails tap sentence after sentence into the computer until late in the evening.

FATHER FIGURE is 175,000 words long, and is divided into three parts: Love, Sex and Death. All the excerpts below are from Part One, except the final excerpt, which is from Part Two. The excerpts are presented in sequential order. The excerpts are not continuous (i.e., there are scenes between the excerpts not included here).

FATHER FIGURE contains explicit sexuality and violence, as well as ideas some might find disturbing.

FATHER FIGURE was published in March, 2003 by Bookbooters in a trade paperback edition. Bookbooters has unfortunately since gone out of business. You can download the entire novel, for free, in PDF format, by going here.

For purposes of classifying my fiction, I consider any story weighing in at around 10,000 words to be a novelette. Both of these pieces qualify: THIS MOMENT OF BRILLIANCE comes in at 9,500 words, ZOMBIE BETRAYAL at 11,500.

The novelette is a length I'm particularly comfortable with, and in fact quite a few of my stories, not available on this site at this time, fall within its word count. A novelette doesn't require the months-long or years-long commitment of a novel, and yet there's more than enough room within one for the leisurely development of ideas. It's all right, in a novelette, to occasionally forget about the story's ending, to walk down a path just for the joy of wandering away from the hum of the narrative engine.

THIS MOMENT OF BRILLIANCE tells the story of a wet work specialist with a little too much wiggle room in the Maine to Florida corridor. I wanted the simplest possible name for the protagonist, finally settling on 'Ed'.

The idea for ZOMBIE BETRAYAL occurred after Mary and I saw our hundredth or so cheap European horror film on video, the type that's always a joint production among Spanish, Italian and sometimes German film companies. I found myself starting to imagine a married, middle-aged couple who acted in these films, one of them experiencing, after so many scenes with fake death, a brush against the real thing. As a writer I was also intrigued by the idea of starting a story funny, then moving towards sorrow.

Both novelettes are presented here in their complete texts. They are not excerpts.

THIS MOMENT OF BRILLIANCE was first published in issue number 5 of Lullaby Hearse. ZOMBIE BETRAYAL is unpublished at this point.

big inches
despair at mcdonald's
when you surfaced
sex on sheets
the rape
cat head

A short story is a game played between writer and reader. The reader steps from word to word through the sentences, down the paragraphs, not certain where he or she is being led. Parts of the path are so well prepared -- a description, a dialogue -- we walk back up a stretch of stones just for the pleasure of strolling back down the paragraph again. In the best stories, the reader is called to the clearing of the final sentence, where the writer's short stab slides in.

The act of reading, at least in English and other European languages, is from left to right to the end of a line, then right to left to see the beginning of the next line, then left to right again, and so on. The act of reading, in effect, is a spiral slowly headed downwards.

As we descend into this worldlet built for us, even our attention to the details crafted for our pleasure does not allow us to see what the author has hidden here and there along the way. These may be revealed at the end, held out in the author's palms so that we want to travel back to a particular curve to uncover the clue concealed there, or may be revealed only on a rereading, or may remain forever buried, stepped over countless times, but never studied.

But that's all part of the game.

BIG INCHES tells of a passage many readers associated with drug smuggling, although when I wrote the tale I was more concerned with metaphysics than marijuana. It's always surprising how others interpret something you've written. There's a certain amount of magic amok in this story, from the machine-tapping to the rolled-up sleeves at the end. The ideal reader will realize that 'Pottah', its two syllables separated and the letters in each syllable reversed, spells 'top hat'.

DESPAIR AT MCDONALDS is a road novel, condensed to a few thousand sad words. The protagonists travel through an hallucinogenic America, ending up where they started.

Writing is a weapon aimed against the world. With The Sex Act stories, a story cycle I started in the late nineteen eighties, I decided to aim at sexuality. Because sexuality is more distorted than we will admit, I wrote these stories through the funhouse exaggeration of sexual obsession. Although these stories feature male characters with different names and faces, all are meant to chronicle the sexual odyssey of the same male. Think of it as the spirit of sexual distortion gliding urethrally through the stories fuck to fuck. Three stories from the cycle are included here. In the first, WHEN YOU SURFACED, the main character, Toby, is the one manipulated. Years later, in SEX ON SHEETS, our hero has learned to be the manipulator. THE RAPE portrays total commitment to obsession, and includes as a bonus a speed bump for speed readers.

Another story cycle of mine, Recorded Occurrences, experiments with the illogical narrative of dreams. Our world lives next to another world. Your profile rests against your pillow, your ear down in the softness, the warmth, the weave, hearing, then listening. You gaze at the wall, soon seeing patterns, soon movement, soon a small white hand reaching out, offering. The premise of each Recorded Occurrences story is absurd, but the narrative then attempts to develop that premise in an orderly manner, although more through association than conventional plot. Each story is told in the second person, to encourage the reader to feel the story as being his or her own dream. The stories are a lot of fun to write. Not only because of the challenge I face with each, having to follow the rules I've set up, but also because they allow me to approach the whole idea of story-telling in a different way. CAT HEAD is an example of that exploration.

BIG INCHES was first published in the Winter 1989 issue of Space & Time, and reprinted in the April, 2001 issue of ChiZine. DESPAIR AT MCDONALDS was first published in Volume 4, 1990 of Collages and Bricolages. WHEN YOU SURFACED was first published in Sign of the Times, Winter '86-'87. Although several magazines expressed enthusiasm about the story, only Sign of the Times had the courage to publish it, for which I am eternally grateful to editor-publisher Mark Souder. SEX ON SHEETS was first published in Sign of the Times, Winter '87-'88, and anthologized in Sign of the Times' 10-Year Anthology Edition. Several paragraphs of the text of SEX ON SHEETS were edited-out for its publication in Sign of the Times. Those paragraphs are restored here. THE RAPE was first published in Sein und Werden, Volume 1, Issue 2 (Fall, 2006). CAT HEAD was first published in the July, 2004 issue of Lunatic Chameleon.

I've counted them twice now
I fucked his girlfriend while he watched
In the cafe we ordered our food
I was told it would be different
In Panama we lived in an apartment
He no longer recognized his face
I am reasonably certain I locked the door
I came to not knowing where I was
The text has become corrupted
Having a drink in a bar
By the third day the birds were eating the dead
Something's replacing your bones the dentist said
That's the way punks think
He dyed his part the same color as her hair
When cockroaches start farting
Sometimes when he fell asleep
Entering the iron train
Clanging up the iron stairs
We used to put them in olives, Meg says
The coolest kids gather in Father McCauley's outer office
Walk down to the end of the block
We have won driving down the street
I've always felt it's nicer to use female urine
The smell of mcdonald's french fries in the bedroom where you died
The best thing about her are her dark eyebrows

Each of these one-paragraph stories push the stylistic concepts explored in my Recorded Occurrences stories, discussed above, to a further extreme. Here, the illogic is emphasized to an even greater degree, by deliberately stripping out most of the elements of a conventional narrative, taking only bits and pieces of a story and jamming them together to force some kind of sense in the chaos of one long, unpunctuated sentence. These experiments differ from most extremely short fiction in that each actually does develop a story from beginning to end, and each eschews the easy out of simply juxtaposing unrelated phrases within a single paragraph for a surreal effect.

Like a hole being dug, the texts at the bottom of the list are more recent than those near the surface.

I Fucked His Girlfriend While He Watched, In Panama We Lived In An Apartment, and He No Longer Recognized His Face were originally published in 2007 in Sein und Werden, Volume 2, Issue 1.

antarctica
the maddox family home page

Back in 2000, I started a second website, Jump Down The Hole, now defunct, in which I explored different ways of creating fiction, not through linear narrative, but instead through popular website formats.

In Antarctica, I wanted to explore a 'what if' idea. What if Antarctica, rather than being a cold, barren wasteland, was instead a populous nation of beautiful cities, green forests, blue lakes, pink glaciers, with a history going back 40,000 years? Rather than simply writing a story about that notion, I decided to create a fictional tourist-type website devoted to Antarctica, much like sites created on behalf of Germany, New Zealand, or Brazil.

In The Maddox Family Home Page, I wanted to write a story about a single, middle-aged father raising a daughter. Normally, I'd do that using conventional narrative to create a novelette, but this time I decided to tell their story piecemeal, through the different pages of their family website, the father's on-line diary, poetry page, recipes page, and the site's guestbook all contributing insights into their lives, all the pages together revealing the full story.

This mimicking of popular website formats intrigued me also because it allowed the reader, by choosing links according to their own preference, to start anywhere they wanted within the fiction, then explore the lie in a sequence determined by their own link clickings.