Resurrecting the Serial
An Editor's Note
We live in a time of episodic entertainment. We wait patiently for the next episode of “Rectify” on Sundance, or “Game of Thrones” on HBO.
Once upon a time, episodic entertainment was also common in the literary world. Brits of the early 19th century waited eagerly for the next weekly installment of the next Charles Dickens novel. Rolling Stone kept the tradition alive in the 20th century, serializing works by Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe.
The Bitter Southerner figured if Dickens and Rolling Stone could do it, why not us?
Today — as a special bonus in the middle of our 2017 membership drive — we begin a serialization of Alabama-born writer (and BS contributor) Charles McNair’s third novel, “The Epicureans.” And you, as readers, will have a unique chance to watch this story unfold, even before Charles himself knows exactly how it will end.
We’ll run chapter 1 today, and this Sunday, we’ll publish chapter 2. Every Sunday thereafter, you’ll get a new chapter until the book is complete.
About “The Epicureans”
Who are they? What are they, The Epicureans?
They possess great wealth. They share extravagant tastes. They have met secretly on the winter solstice for the past 24 years to enjoy … a very unusual meal.
The shadowy group of gourmands gathers next in a lavish new mansion in the Deep South, where a magnate named Mr. Wood waits to satisfy his unholy appetites … and where a wounded warrior named Elmore Rogers just tries to survive for the sake of his twin children.
Now with the solstice upon them, it starts to snow. As the Alabama landscape sleeps under a veil of enchantment, Elmore begins to learn that something unimaginably wicked stirs at the Wood place…and that his former employer hungers for what Elmore holds dearest.
How can poor, battle-scarred Elmore — and Kelly, his beautiful, estranged, deeply troubled ex — protect the thing they love most from the power of ultimate evil?
About Charles McNair
CHARLES McNAIR | Adela Castro
Charles published a critically acclaimed, Pulitzer-nominated novel, “Land O’ Goshen” (St. Martin’s Press) in 1994. In it, a brilliantly disguised teen hero fights for right and finds love in a dystopian, post-apocalypse South. Charles’s second novel, “Pickett’s Charge” (Livingston Press, 2013), is the Don Quixote-like saga of a vengeful, 114-year-old Confederate, the last rebel soldier, who heads north tilting at 1960s America in a quest to find … and fight … the last living Yankee.
Charles now brings his imaginative gifts to bear again in a brand-new novel, a tale of terror, intrigue, love, and redemption published for the first time here in The Bitter Southerner. Some people wonder whether evil really exists. You won’t after you read “The Epicureans.”
In October 2017, Mercer University Press will publish Charles’s new non-fiction work, “Play It Again, Sam: The Notable Life of Atlanta’s First Minority Mayor, A History of Sam Massell.”
Charles comes from Alabama (with a banjo on his knee – a tattoo), and he lives in Bogotá, Colombia, in the high Andes. He makes a living writing and as co-founder of MAS, a leadership communications consultancy. Charles served as books editor at Paste magazine from 2005 to 2015, and he frequently contributes to The Bitter Southerner. For this journey with “The Epicureans,” he thanks Henry; his writer-group colleagues Tom Junod, Mel Konner, and Chantal James, aka The Verbalists; and his fiancée vallenata, Adela Castro.
And We Begin...
