American Morons
Page 20
For Glen. How not to write.
Then, last winter, I was snatching books from my shelves to save them from the rain pouring through our crumbling roof when I came across my grandfather’s copy of Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah. Good book, I remember thinking, though it had been decades, literally, since I’d read it. I remembered it had been a favorite of my grandfather’s. I opened the front cover and found this:
For my only literate grand-son. From his Grandfather, who was a Muldoon in his own right.
The Big Judge
The “only literate grand-son” bit proved grossly unfair to, and completely inaccurate about, both my brother and my cousins. But it was my grandfather’s voice, alright, provocative, noisy, opinionated, trying to tell me something. I re-read the whole book that weekend, trying to find what “Muldoon” meant, though I thought I knew. The word barely surfaces in the novel. My friend, the spectacularly gifted poet Darcie Dennigan, asked a list-serve group to which she belongs to do some research, and came back with a scant handful of uses of the term in the press or in public documents over the course of the last century. Most uses, though, circled around the same basic idea: a Muldoon is someone who takes care of his own.
Balcony Ball is a real game, copyright 1973 or so by my brother and me, though it’s more than possible my uncle and aunt had a precursor of their own when they lived in that house (my mother had already left for college by the time her family moved there).
Berger cookies may be the best cookies ever to become available in a bag.
About the Author
Three-time International Horror Guild Award Winner Glen Hirshberg’s novels include The Snowman’s Children, The Book of Bunk, Motherless Child, and Good Girls. The third book in the Motherless Children Series is currently in production. Hirshberg is also the author of three widely praised story collections: The Two Sams (a Publishers’ Weekly Best Book of 2003), American Morons, and The Janus Tree. Hirshberg is a five-time World Fantasy Award finalist, and In 2008, he won the Shirley Jackson Award for the novelette, “The Janus Tree.” With Peter Atkins and Dennis Etchison, he co-founded the Rolling Darkness Revue, an annual reading/live music/performance event that tours the west coast of the United States every fall and has also made international appearances.
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Visit him online at www.glenhirshberg.com.
This Digital Edition Copyright © 2016 by
Glen Hirshberg
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
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The stories in American Morons originally appeared as follows:
“American Morons”: Darkness Rising: The Rolling Darkness Revue Chapbook 2005.
“Like a Lily in a Flood”: Cemetery Dance #50, 2004.
“Flowers on Their Bridles: Hooves in the Air”: on Scifiction.com, 2003.
“Safety Clowns”: Acquainted with the Night, Ash-Tree Press, 2004.
“Transitway”: Cemetery Dance #56, 2006.
“Devil’s Smile” and “The Muldoon”: original to this collection.
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Cemetery Dance Publications
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The characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
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Cover image © 2006 by Jonas Yip
Cover design © 2016 by Kathryn Freeman
Cemetery Dance Publications
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