An "addiction to telling the truth,
usually at the worst possible time"

Blazing Reader,

I finished reading Mountain Blues, a novel by Sean Arthur Joyce. Many of my longtime readers know Joyce’s work, as I quote several verses from his poetry collection, Diary of a Pandemic Year, at the end of my novel, Much Ado About Corona. Sean also wrote Words from the Dead, a collection of essays that analyze the COVID plandemic by contrasting it to works of literature, poetry and history.

Before the COVID scandal, Sean had already written Mountain Blues — a novel about a small town fighting big government. Mountain Blues opens with a Vancouver reporter, named Roy Breen, moving out to the town of Eldorado in the mountains of British Columbia. Roy soon finds himself helping his new neighbours protest plans to cut the town's emergency room down to nine to five bankers' hours.

Oh, and public health also wants to confiscate their only X-ray machine — which was paid for with donations raised by the community.

Here's just a flavour of how the first-person narrative kept me eagerly reading:

"I knew a lot of former reporters at the West Coast who'd left their jobs to take up public relations jobs in the government or corporate sector. In a way, I could understand it. The pay was better, and you at least got benefits. You weren't subjected to the daily barrage of bad news and then expected to stick your nose in it, drill down, and come up with a story that didn't stink of despair. All you had to do was check your integrity at the door and strap on the mouthpiece. Which, unfortunately for my retirement prospects, was never something I could bring myself to do. My old man during my rebellious teen years used to say I had an 'addiction to telling the truth, usually at the worst possible time.' For a long time this really stung. Then when I got to college and studied journalism, I realized: Without our truthtellers, without a strong independent media, democracy becomes a pathetic shadow of itself. Sometimes the worst possible time to say something needs to be said IS the best possible time."

Mountain Blues offers unique characters (including Moss the Crawler, a Jamaican immigrant who protests the hospital closure by leading a one-man, multi-day march on his knees), soaring glacial vistas and an engrossing plot that serves a delightful blend of conflict and joviality.

You can check out the gotta-love-it retro cover and purchase a copy here: https://blazingpinecone.com/shop/mountain-blues

John C.A. Manley

John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story, the forthcoming All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of speculative fiction. Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber at: https://blazingpinecone.com/subscribe/