Political Satire/Fiction
Date Published: October 28th, 2025
Publisher: Acorn Publishing
The battle pits cereal titan Todd Swindell, head of Flakes Alive Incorporated, against Chad Scandalman of the Great American Flake Company. When Scandalman hires a diminutive assassin named Twinkle to bump off his rival’s top chemist, it sparks a war of the flakes that makes the bloody feud of York and Lancaster look tame by comparison.
But not everyone in the Cornflake capital of Domino, Indiana, is happy with the status quo. Ziggie Wexler, an unemployed pipefitter and all-around average Joe, knows that something is deeply wrong with his country.
All history prior to 2040 has been banned, but old-timers whisper about the days when people still voted for their leaders. After Ziggie posts fiery polemics against the state to the Clandestine Journal, he becomes a marked man. But in a world built on lies, there’s one truth he’s sure of. Somebody needs to fight back.
Author Interview
JO: The book offers a warning against the current trajectory of authoritarian corporate rule in America. By now the decline of democracy should be evident to all but the most fervid presidential worshipers. The horror of totalitarianism depicted in this book should scare anyone with an ounce of sense into some kind of action. Yet, I know a lot of people do not want to read another political economic book, so I laced it with satire.
JO: I think I was in the first grade. I wrote a paper about my favorite topics, one of which was the ocean. Only, I spelled it “oshean.” My dad chuckled when he read it. The embarrassment of that blooper made me want to become a better writer.
JO: Yes, two. Animal Candy and Pods of Bubbledumb: A Study in Mass Depravity. The former was basically a vanity project about the suburban Chicago PCP scene in the 1970s and my involvement in it. The latter was a work depicting astonishment that the American public could vote in a criminal president without scruples.
JO: Yes, Planet Globablob, is my next project. Like Corporate Almighty, it will embody an attack on capitalism. Globablob is a democratic socialist planet in a parallel universe.
JO: I love to read classic novels, collect antique maps and postcards, look at old coins, and pet our four cats.
JO: That complacency permeates the fabric of our current politics.
Some writers have something playing in the background, do you and what?
JO: Literally, psychedelic rock and prog-rock. Figuratively, thoughts of future books about authoritarian capitalism.
Tell us a little about yourself. Perhaps something not many people know about?
JO: I was once a drummer on the local Chicago and Northwest Indiana music scene. But not a very good one. I have a very eclectic taste in music. I am far more knowledgeable about music than I am a good musician. During the 1980s, I played in a hardcore punk band, a classic rock band, a blues band and a country band. Never was a big fan of country, but the industrial south suburbs of Chicago over the years attracted a lot of transplanted hillbillies to work the steel mills, oil refineries, and chemical factories, so playing country music could be quite lucrative from a starving musician’s standpoint.
JO: Awareness about our current status as a faltering democracy and an upstart dictatorship.
About the Author
Immensely curious about human behavior, James spent the 1970s hanging out on the streets to observe people, many of whom became inspirations for his fictional characters. Later, he worked in cube farms at conservative insurance companies, where the idiosyncrasies of corporate personalities sparked his imagination.
James has spent the last decade reading and writing offbeat fiction about bizarre protagonists. Corporate Almighty: 2098, a dystopian tale about the rise of the corporation and the fall of democracy, follows his first two novels, Animal Candy and Pods of Bubbledumb: A Study in Mass Depravity.
Born and raised in an industrial suburb on the south edge of Chicago, James lives with his wife Sue and four cats in Evansville, Indiana.
No comments:
Post a Comment