Collins-Eden's Apple

Info
Catalogue #: 369
ISBN: 0-9634913-6-9 178 pages paper $9.95

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Description
It's bombs away in Baghdad. And Eden, California is about to receive its prodigal son. With all of America riveted to their television screens watching the Iraqi war, the lives of five unlikely people crisscross. The story that follows is by turns complex, bizarre, and explosive. As it plays out, in the background, the media coverage of the war plays out--reporters whoring stories like five-dollar prostitutes.

From the Press
Collin's first novel, written with a wry, straightforward sense of twenty-something irony, provides a metaphor that's not lost in symbolism; there's no need to read between the lines.

This is the story of Max Stole, a San Francisco hospital's activities director who contracts the childhood illness chicken pox, but since he's in his 20s, his case happens to coincide with the outbreak of war in the Persian Gulf. In the midst of his delirious battle with chicken pox and the war, he loses his job and returns to Eden, his hometown. Meanwhile, in another part of town, Eileen Edison is fighting a battle of her own, grapling with the loss of her leg.... She is also grappling with the outbreak of war and her own legacy of opposition which had driven her out of a small town in Northern California.

Eden is a conservative town that believes in the flag, apple pie, and fighting wars. Ty Blunt works as a cashier at the local market. Now divorced, he finds himself constantly confronting his ex-wife Sandy on a multitude of issues, particularly concerning Tommy, their son who sits in a tank in the Saudi desert awaiting the start of the ground war. Like every good, red-blooded American, Ty enthusiastically supports the war while inwardly he faces the very real possibility that he may lose Tommy the same way he lost his father. When Max reads an article concerning a local teacher who was run out of town, the ironic chain of events that was set in motion back in San Francisco picks up speed. The disparate lives of five people come together.... All the while, the sounds and sights of the Gulf War provide the backdrop on radios and TVs all over the country.

Collins skillfully weaves the lives of the characters in a taut narrative. The imagery is vivid, the plot credible, the metaphors, like the smart bombs of the Persian Gulf, are right on target.

Rapport (formerly West Coast Review of Books)

Author's Bio
Patri Collins studied film at UC Santa Cruz, has worked on independent film projects in San Francisco and Los Angeles and currently is living in Seattle. His short stories have been published in Minotaur, Mortal Lips, and Chinquapin. Eden's Apple is his first novel. Currently Collins is writing a novel involving forgery and Tibet.

Author's Comment
The last big war the U.S. was in was the Vietnam War. A lot of peope have speculated that the reason there was so much outcry and civil disobedience was because this war was covered by the media pretty much uncensored. I mean we saw it every night in technicolor on our TVs, unedited. That changed how people saw war. They saw what really happened. The Gulf War, however, was a television war with made-for-TV images that were designed to sell the war. In my book I am trying to show how this selling of the war, those kinds of images, were affecting peoples' lives.

Patri Collins, interviewed in www.b2r.com

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