Hate

Recently, Thriller Guy’s alter ego Allen Appel was going through boxes of old manuscripts and correspondence having to do with past books. He’ll take it from here…

I can’t remember why I thought it was important to save various drafts of my novels that had been marked up with edits. Because I’ve written so many books these edits add up to many thousands of pages, pages that are heavy and a pain-in-the-ass to dispose of. Amongst all these manuscripts I found piles of letters from readers who wrote on actual paper and sent them to me, usually via the publisher. That’s the way we used to do it back in the Paleolithic era; now every bozo with a computer can hunt you down on Google and send you a death threat because he doesn’t like your attitude or your writing. The vast majority of these letters were positive, but there was one, ONE! That was so brilliantly vituperous I’ve decided to put it up here in its entirety.

My original thought was to use the name and address of the writer, but after having Googled him I’ve decided that he is probably a usually reasonable fellow and that my book Till the End of Time, the third in my series featuring time traveler Alex Balfour, for some reason pushed him over the edge into madness. I will say that his last name is the same as that of a past president who was both loathed and adored. Without any further ado…

Dear Mr. Appel:

            After reading “Till the End of Time”, it didn’t take too much effort to deduce that you are a member of that sleazy band of a low-life parade of bozoes who would, for the sake of free love, marijuana and a snort of just about any foreign substance that would fit up your nose, flush down the toilet all those positive and decent values (Love of country, respect toward authority, the Golden Rule, etc.) taught us all in grammar school. And at a time when so many of us fought long and hard in the jungles, mountains and rice paddies of Vietnam in defense of the same democratic principles that allow even an asshole such as yourself to put out the pathetic rubbish that is representative of “Till the End of Time.”

            And how do you know that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy slept with Marilyn Monroe? Are you some kind of long lost eyewitness (perhaps from a nearby closet in panting, wheezing, drooling observation?) of this so-called infidelity? Or have you filled that airhead of yours with all that sensational tripe which appears, quite strongly, to be the framework for this “Literary Dud” of which you must surely have bribed someone at Doubleday to publish.

            You should give up writing, Allen Appel. And then get down on your knees and thank the Good Lord that, for the moment, John Kennedy isn’t around to defend himself. Because if he were, he would put a foot so far up your cowardly ass, that you would taste shoe leather “Till The End Of Time.”

                                                                                                Sincerely,

                                                                                                M. R.

I didn’t write back to M.R. perhaps the only person who bothered to write and never received a response from me, because he seemed balanced on the knife-edge of homicidal madness, and I did not want him turning up on my doorstep with some of the many weapons he probably owns.

But everyone is entitled to an opinion, I guess. About the same time I received this letter my publisher sent me a review by a columnist somewhere in Idaho who had written in his local newspaper that Till the End of Time was “perhaps the best book that had ever been written in the history of the world.” Which is just the other side of the same coin.

Readers are encouraged to go to Amazon and search out a copyof this explosive work, or any of the others in the series and give it/them a read.

I’d be glad to hear from you.