Volume V- Issue 9,  October 2006
Published by Llumina Press

Llumina Press

Contact Person: Robyn Benson

Address: 7915 W. McNab Rd.; Tamarac, FL 33321

Telephone:  (866) 229-9244          Fax:  (954) 726-0902
Email: robyn@llumina.com
URL: http://www.llumina.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
 

The Truth Deserves a Bodyguard of Lies….

Fort Lauderdale, August 2006: Or so said Winston Churchill (before he was dead). And how right he was.  In Cats in a Chowder, the new hilarious and compelling novel by Fred J Schneider, this certainly is true for the Sisler family, a family flailing through a sump of their own secrets and deceptions. And who better to guard the family’s lies than its youngest son, and newest communicant, Robin, a Catholic surprise with a few sticky secrets of his own.

After years of questionable guidance from most things holy, Brooklynite ― and devout Yankee hater ― Harry Sisler determines to be his own god, leading his family to the wilderness of 1950’s Long Island where the Ronkonkoma trees are filled with ticks and the friggin’ air squeaks. There he is driven by two moronic prophesies: that he will raise a centerfielder better than “the damn DiMaggio,” and that he will die promptly at the age of fifty.

But Harry’s wife, Agatha, has her own ideas, in fact she has her own god, and she’s going to get her god to whack Harry’s by offering her son Robin to the priesthood, the way Harry would offer him to baseball.

In this Lenten chowder of madness, desperate schemes of evacuation boil. The Sisler family detonates, and Harry (one prophesy dead now) leaves the family to chase his fortune to the new gold rush, the Alaskan pipeline. It is there, however, that he must come face to face with his second prophesy ― and last chance to be right about something ― the timing of his own death. 

Only the prodigal son Robin can save him. But for that to happen, Robin must shake his nagging ambiguity and become a man in is own right… and he’d better hurry.

About the Author:

With his wife Robin and daughters Casey and Summer, Fred J Schneider makes his home in Saranac Lake, NY looking out over six waves of Adirondack mountains.

During the horrific dawn of disco, when the whole country was blinded by that insipid mirrored ball, he railed against the machine, exhausting his college years (and tuition) wearing a sweat-rimmed Met hat and quixotically paying homage to the, alas, all-too-mortal Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. It was useless, yet embers still burn.

A humor essayist on Public Radio, Fred’s follow up novel, One Less Squirrel in Swellsville, is slated for publication in September 2008.