James A Landry

Fool Star James A Landry

Fool Star is a work of Pulp Style Contemporary Fiction. It is a tale of a

traveling musician and performer named Tony, whose undiagnosed tendencies

toward a sad psychosis and schizophrenia eventually spawn action fitting for the sociopath few know, exists.




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Fool Star effectively plumbs the depths of its characters in ways that spiral toward an understanding of the people they were and have become. Set against a backdrop of life on the southern rock and roll club circuit, and big dreams almost-in-the-grasp, it weaves together a set of characters' lives and fortunes in often unexpected, sometimes sad, sometimes hilarious, and always thought-provoking, ways. Childhood moments, both lived and stolen, evolve into adult character traits, desires and sometimes undoings in both necessary and unexpected ways. Tony, the main character, and sometimes narrator, falls from an introspective early grace, undone by years of hard living, drug abuse and personal struggle, to become a sociopath who is driven by an unnamed ambition that completely overtakes his humanity. Those he loves dearly, slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, become impediments, and his emotional withdrawal from the world around him is punctuated by a set of final actions that leave the reader stunned but not disbelieving; the changes in Tony are complete and profound. As I read Fool Star my emotions ran a surprisingly broad gamut in response to the lives and actions that spun together; it is a ride through a southern rock and roll band's career that is at once believable, frightening in its implications and entertaining. This is a book I will read a second time.