My next novel, Sound Effect Infinity, will release early this spring. I’ve been busy prepping it for print publishing by Flat Branch Press over the past few weeks. A special edition hardcover will have a soft launch in February. If you’re interested in ordering a copy, drop me a line, sign up to the right for our mailing list, or follow me on Instagram or Facebook.

In the mean time, I’m dropping a brief scene below, and not from the early sections of

the book, but deep in. You won’t have enough context to fully get it, but hopefully your interest will be piqued.

From Chapter 15: Mass Communication

Most mornings, Lucas Fancher left his glass on the kitchen table and went out to sit on the front porch to think and wait. However, on the morning after the Rocheport tent riot, he needed to know what had happened before everyone else at the compound, so he took the screeno with him. He sat in his chair with the sun tree-topping orange light in the distance and the latent promise of heat in the air. A cup of coffee sat on the floorboards near his feet. An unlit, hand-rolled smoker dangled from the side of his lips. He was aware that the smoke paper could disintegrate quickly from his saliva if he didn’t light up soon. His left ankle cricked across his right knee so that the screen cradled in the resulting platform his left thigh made as he read and watched news coverage.

It sure seemed like a good thing that no one else from the Red House had gone to observe the event. Someone had actually died during the melee. A teenage girl named Mary Shadduck had her neck broken in the crush up against the stage. The father claimed his daughter was now a martyr for The King. The parents were interviewed by “unidentified reporters” in front of the hospital entrance. Fancher could tell it was Janie Hawthorn and, of course, myself. I had no idea that Fancher was as clued in and expectant as he was. Back then, no one would have predicted that with of any of his people.

While Janie and I and her camera guy interviewed the girl’s parents, the rest of the USON crew was off trying to figure out how much of the riot they’d captured on disk and how much of their equipment might still be functioning.

In the end, they had enough footage of Elvis being very weird and the first stage rush, so that they could issue a voice-over piece by Janie. After the interview at the hospital, she headed off with her guys to finish the video while I scurried back to my rental for a few nips and to make sure the recording of my discussion with Coral McGrey was usable.

As I opened the door, the chime of the rental was still oddly soothing. And yet, in the silence of that enclosed car, the crackle of the paper bag containing my whiskey reminded me, almost violently, of what I’d just witnessed several hours before. How much of that apparition on stage was simply created and enhanced by fans? So many years back, he had been the first to truly instill insane fanaticism on a mass scale. Once it was set loose, it was always out there, like a virus that had been in hiding. In many ways, that’s what drove him into isolation near the end of his first life. It’s what was said to have killed him.

Fans weren’t real, though. They’re never real. They saw and heard something about someone else inside themselves. Fans were performing, too. So, was it all simply people caught up in an internal emotional whirlwind of their own making? Or was it bigger, something created by everyone together, legend and image and media hype constantly rounding off the edges, masking whoever was on stage into what everyone thought they needed to see and feel and hear?

I never once wondered reasonably if that person up there was who the Reverend Sumter claimed he was, but the effect was enough to call up big questions that seemed fundamentally necessary to slip into my reporting—if not directly since Treestat hated open, honest thought-provoking writing, then at least I wanted to imply what really had to be obvious to anyone under that tent in one way or another. Mass hypnosis may well be more stupendous and astounding than any surreal, charismatic personality-based magic coming to fruition. What is group think? How does it work? Do people pass some feeling amongst themselves?

I wish I could have looked closely into the eyes of that person up there talking about time and infinity. I knew enough to understand the problem with the actual Elvis, from start to finish. He’d never understood what he needed to tell us. It was like he’d somehow jumped out of his body in 1954, but didn’t know it, except to sense there was something he needed to see that he couldn’t find just behind him or just around the next corner. He was always part child and part weary teenage warrior. And that sadness? I imagine there can’t be a much lonelier feeling than to be an artistic genius and have no idea that’s what you are.

What did he see when he looked in the mirror? He certainly didn’t see what we saw. If I could have looked in that guy’s eyes, I would have been able to tell how close to real he was. And the voice? The voice echoing out under that tent should have told us all we needed to know. But he’d camouflaged it with strange meaning, using words like infinity and eternity. I couldn’t recall the sound of the actual person up there at all. It was almost as if he hadn’t said a thing and that his communication had simply been inside each of us. But that wasn’t true. Even from what I know now all these years later.

As a kid just learning to love all that music, I studied the video records of him obsessively. When Elvis wasn’t on stage or in view of movie cameras, it seemed like he was trying to find himself in what surrounded him, probably even what he smelled, but it’s likely he never figured out how impossible it is to find anything real when you’re looking for yourself in others.

I could see, I thought as I began to think of myself as a journalist, that his eyes, after a while, began to carry evidence of all that pointless searching. Over the years, I’d noticed bits of the same thing in others I wrote about—slight creases and stretch marks around the lids, something swimming or flickering in an iris every now and then, a dim blinking point of light. A few writers over the years reported that stars like Elvis had always seemed like they were attempting to learn the gaze of their fans. Too many of those fans said they were willing to die for him or donate money to a campaign fund set up in his name. Some left home for Memphis and camped out at the gates of Graceland for months waiting to tell him how much they loved him.

What was so enticing to them? He certainly didn’t understand, couldn’t. But it’s likely that he wanted to, desperately at times. How can you spend twenty years of a career wanting people to love and revere you, but not understand in the end how or why you might deserve that? It truly was odd how the people mirror thing worked with him, how if we stared at him too long, or opened our hearts and tried to let him know how confused he made us, he became more and more emptied out and ephemeral.

Watching him was watching ourselves, didn’t matter the color of your skin or your sexual inclination, or your gender, or religion. Yes, of course he had an erotic effect on women (at least), but it always seemed they were actually as horny for themselves as they were for him. Here we were then, decades after his supposed demise—that truly sad, even pathetic, fat, drug-induced, death-choked heart attack—and we were still in search of that glimpse of him-as-us in the mirror.

Maybe he was just the first waystation, an intersection for humanity that rose out of the shadows of a world in the 1950s in the process of connecting to itself nearly everywhere. His fundamental, prominent state of being made it easier back then for everyone to cross paths and land on him, link arms, blend styles, cultures, and histories, come together, influence, gently steal from one another, turn all forms of sound and music into something endlessly new and noisy, dancing like crazy, trying out materialism as a worldview, amalgamating, dancing with an obtuse level of desire, always idiotically hopeful everywhere on the planet, even in the darkest most chaotic, atonal moments.

From Elvis came every form of artistic inclination each of us could muster up once we became teens all run amok as reverberation, shifting pulse, and the unending echo of underground emotions that each of us has to learn to live with by the time the clock winds down and we are no longer under twenty. And still, maybe forever, the dancing with an obtuse level of desire.

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