re/make/re/model: Shear Infamy

Sheer Mayhem

New York is hit by a wave of bombings, and a lack of anything cool to wear.

Sheer Power
Hot on the trail but cool in their fashion, a wild bunch works against time and the military to find out who is responsible.
Shear Infamy, is on the case of the murders. She is the protean protagonist, who travels the broken landscape of a fragmented America, in search of justice and sweet flattering footwear.
Shear Infamy, is a human comedy in the age of terrorism and totalitarianism set fifteen minutes into the future of New York City. It comes from the tradition of J.G.Ballard and Thomas Pynchon, and navigates the terrain between Ulysses and Rick & Morty. It is a dark satire on how history victimizes its witnesses, and how they resist.

Shear Infamy, an eternally hip woman in her late thirties who decides to confront the bombings - and her own mid-life crisis - by becoming a crime fighter. Surrounded by her ex-boyfriends; two women whose closet she is parasitically living in; and a group of military police; Shear investigates a crime that has shaken the world around her.

Included in the dramatis personae are the traumatized Evelin Nook, who lost her sister and her lover in the bombing, Captain Giacomo Straniero, military investigator with a dark and tragic past, Jissabel D’ladie, heiress and femme fatale, Agent Gogol Swinecock, freelance expert and analyst for the security services, Danny Quinn, the revolutionary woke pornographer, Francis Cabliban, an adventurer being hunted by two men in grey suits, Long Dong Wong, a pot dealer and gorrilla insurgent, and Maggy Cranny, who just wants Shear to get out of her apartment.

The novel is as fragmented as the lives we live, with each chapter examining a different way of thinking and writing. From movie trailers, to game shows, to epic poetry, the story progresses through comic fake to tragic turn.

With its diverse and Dickensian cast, Shear Infamy is an examination of how to live in a world of violence and imagery, where to be is to be seen. The novel ends on a note of hope as friendship and love are illuminated as the only things worth holding onto.

Outline

Chapter 1 Mea culpa - A terrorist attack with much style but no substance. The bombing of the Dreamland Disco told in a series of vignettes in the style of a movie trailer.

Chapter 2 Relationships & references & radicals - As they were reported: the facts, the figures, the meat, the bone, all of the roast beneath the smoke. The unraveling of the response to the terrorist attack as we learn more about the characters..

Chapter 3 Interrogations - Where a great many questions are asked but few answers given. Shear, Maggie and Evelin are taken for questioning by a game show android.

Chapter 4 The Screamer and the shriek - The thirst for peace in a desert of chaos. Evelin Nook tries to deal with the pain and guilt of surviving while surrounded by debris tourists.

Chapter 5 It’s a small world... - It's a world of laughter, a world of tears and it is getting smaller all the time. We meet Danny Quinn in the midst of a pornographic liberation operation.

Chapter 6 New Jersey ...and on the third day, she rose again, in fufillment of the scriptures...Shear descends into the land of the dead, the Jersey Shore, in search of answers.

Chapter 7 I Am Not An Agent Of The State - A guide for the independent traveler in an interdepent nation. Francis Calaban travels the United States looking for an ex-scientist who is somehow involved in the attack.

Chapter 8 The ballad of Long Dong Wong - A tale told from a respective future perspective. Long rescues Francis from certain death and they continue to find the scientist held by a group of mutated suburban children.

Chapte 9 SNAFU - Where everything is clearly and succinctly stated, but it really doesn't help at all. The investigation progresses with the discovery of a brutal murder while Shear’s team watches television.

Chapter 10 Interrogations 2 - Evelin Nook goes on a job interview and recounts the second terrorist bombing - this time at Times Square Subway station.

Chapter 11 An ecumenical moment - In which many facets concerning the onto-theological implications of Empire in the modern Americas and the consequences upon interdoctrinal dicourse are discussed, debated, disputed, deliberated, and disrupted. Danny Quinn makes his voice heard at a debate between theologians on the nature of God and Empire.

Chapter 12 My lives with the sex death cults - Our ultimate desire is for our own extinction. Giacomo Straniero is tormented by memories, fantaies, lust and guilt while recovering from the terrorist attack.