The Savage Detective (ePub)

The color of the world has been forever banished by the burnout of a nuclear holocaust. The people hide in fear and darkness from the wrathful gaze of the malevolent dictatorship known as the Great Many Men. The youth have been raised in a culture of violence and struggle permanently blinding them to the miraculous visions of the past. And witness to it all is retired General Martin Toro, an old, ancient gunslinger, having turned his back on the world in its hour of need and languishing in a self-made tomb unable to escape the phantoms of his past. Content to remain distant from conflict, Toro's old ambitions as a warrior are reawakened when learning of the existence of a small flash drive where the memories of the world before it was destroyed have been stored.

In this post-apocalyptic odyssey, Martin Toro is drawn back into an arena of violence and savagery by old friends attempting to seek what little refuge remains in the world. Looking to obtain a device upon which the secrets of the past are now held, he must contest the advances of dark shadows attempting to extinguish what little hope might still exist. Toro, reluctant to once more engage with his violent tendencies, hesitantly comes along for the journey, seeking hope across the remains of a destroyed country permanently scarred by its savage past. Tracked by the agents of the Great Many Men and vulnerable to the scattered tribes of cannibals and psychopaths left in the wake of nuclear destruction, Toro and his company must summon the entirety of their strength to survive the coming war.

The Savage Detective is a completed work of speculative fiction comprised of 111,020 words. It's a novel set in a post-apocalyptic landscape inspired by such works as The Road by Cormac McCarthy and The Stand by Stephen King. Like these novels, the world in my story is bleak and grim, following protagonists and antagonists attempting to adjust to the malevolent sources of violence structured around them. While constantly vulnerable to the destructive forces of both good and evil, the novel retains the hope that the light within humanity will continue and overcome whatever disastrous odds might attempt to extinguish hope.

The novel is centered around themes of masculine trauma, masculine violence, and masculine coping methods. It arose from my own personal experiences with trauma mixed with toxic standards of masculinity that cause such experiences to fester and develop from the fear inside a young man's mind of exposing himself to others and making himself appear weak. The novel examines how these generational methods of coping form and examine masculine experiences of emotion.