Say hello to A.B. Funkhauser, a fellow Solstice author and all around great lady. Check out her upcoming sequel to
Heuer: Lost and Found, the exciting,
Scooter Nation.
From the author of
HEUER LOST AND FOUND
New from the land
of gonzo
A city divided;
A community under
seige;
Conflicting
values;
And the death of a
beloved.
What will it take
to right the wrongs?
A line in the
pavement.
SCOOTER NATION
Flattening the playground.
Coming 03.13.2016
From Solstice
Publishing
Book
Blurb
Aging managing director Charlie
Forsythe begins his work day with a phone call to Jocasta Binns, the
unacknowledged illegitimate daughter of Weibigand Funeral Home founder Karl
Heinz Sr. Alma Wurtz, a scooter bound sextenarian, community activist, and
neighborhood pain in the ass is emptying her urine into the flower beds,
killing the petunias. Jocasta cuts him off, reminding him that a staff meeting
has been called. Charlie, silenced, is taken aback: he has had no prior input
into the meeting and that, on its own, makes it sinister.
The second novel in the
UNAPOLOGETIC LIVES series, SCOOTER NATION takes place two years after HEUER
LOST AND FOUND. This time, funeral directors Scooter Creighton and Carla
Moretto Salinger Blue take centre stage as they battle conflicting values,
draconian city by-laws, a mendacious neighborhood gang bent on havoc, and a
self absorbed fitness guru whose presence shines an unwanted light on their
quiet Michigan neighborhood.
Excerpt
1967
The old humpback with the cloudy eyes
and Orwellian proletarian attitude pushed past the young embalmer with a curt “Entschuldigen Sie bitte!—Excuse me!” That
Charles E. Forsythe, bespectacled and too tall for his own good, didn’t speak a
word of German was incidental. The man grunting at him, or, more accurately, through him was Weibigand senior
embalmer Heino Schade, who’d been gossiped about often enough at Charlie’s
previous place of employ: “Weibigand’s,”
the hairdresser winked knowingly, “is
like a Stalag. God only knows where the lampshades come from.”
Whether she was referring
to Schade specifically or the Weibigand’s generally didn’t matter. What he
gleaned from the talk and what he took with him when he left to go work for
them was that he was not expected to understand, only to follow orders.
Schade, muttering over a
cosmetic pot that wouldn’t open, suddenly tossed it; the airborne projectile
missing Charlie’s black curls by inches. Jumping out of the way, he wondered
what to do next.
Newly arrived from
Seltenheit and Sons, his new master’s most capricious competitor, expectations
that he perform beyond the norm were high. Trading tit for tat, his old boss
Hartmut Fläche had fought and lost battles with Karl Heinz Senior since 1937,
and wasn’t about to abandon the bad feeling, even as he approached his
ninetieth year. That his star apprentice had left under a tenacious cloud to go
work for the enemy would no doubt hasten old Harty’s resolve to plot every last
Weibigand into the ground before he got there first.
It was incumbent upon
Charlie, therefore, to dish some dirt hopefully juicy enough to shutter
Seltenheit and Son’s for good.
Stories of the two funeral
directors’ acrimony were legend: late night calls to G-men during the war
asserting that Weibigand was a Nazi; anonymous reports to the Board of Mortuary
Science that Fläche reused caskets; hints at felonious gambling; price-fixing;
liquor-making; tax evading; wife swapping; cross dressing; pet embalming;
covert sausage making; smokehouses; whore houses; Commie-loving; Semite-hating;
and drug using sexual merry-making of an unwholesomeness so heinous as to not
be spoken of, but merely communicated through raised eyebrows, was just a
scratch.
Ducking under the low rise
water pipes that bisected Weibigand’s ceiling in the lower service hall,
Charlie shuddered with the thought of retributive action, if only because old
men were scary and he was still young. At twenty, he had finished his requisite
course requirements, albeit at an advanced age. A lot of the guys were
finishing at seventeen, only to be packed off to Vietnam. But Charlie had been
delayed by way of the family pig farm which in many ways, could save his hide
in a pinch. As the eldest male in a houseful of women, running the farm made
him essential if the Draft ever became an issue. It hadn’t so far—he was too
old, the 1950 and up birthdates pulled by lot would never include his. Yet he
was haunted by the prospect of a violent end.
His mother—a gentle soul
who knew the Old Testament chapter and verse—never missed an opportunity to
discourage his dreams for a life in the city. This only aggravated matters. He
was different, and he knew it. For that reason he had to leave.
“You’ll wind up in hell if
you try,” she said fondly, every time he negotiated the subject. In the end, it
was a kick in the ass from the toothless old neighbor that sent him running far
and fast off the front porch: “Yer not
like the others, are ya sweetie?”
“Don’t expect an easy time from the Missus,”
Heino Schade said offhandedly from his vantage over a pasty deceased.
“Mrs. Weibigand?” Charlie
asked, noting that the old man used Madame Dubarry commercial cosmetic in place
of the heavy pancake Seltenheit’s favored.
“You assisted her out of a
particularly difficult situation. She will expect more as a show of your
constant devotion.” He knocked his glass eye back into place with a long spring
forceps.
Charlie understood. He
hadn’t expected a call from the Lodge that infamous night, but then, it wasn’t
everyday that a good friend of the Potentate was found dead in a hotel room
under a hooker.
“In flagrante delicto,”
Schade continued ominously in what appeared to be Latin.
“Indeed,” Charlie said,
faking a working knowledge of the dead language; the unfamiliar term, he
guessed, having more to do with what Karl Heinz Weibigand was doing with a
woman in a seedy hotel room, than his desire to ask Schade how he made his dead
look so dewy.
My Interview with A.B.
1)
You have a lot of bright, funny characters. Are
they based on anyone you know, or are they bits and pieces of several people?
If so, do they know about it?
I’ve said more than once that behind every fiction there’s a
fact or two. I think my characters began as personal observations made either
by me or by others over the last three decades. Things I’ve read in the news,
places where I’ve worked, associations that I’ve belonged to gave rise to
thoughts and feelings looking for a place to land. That’s where the characters
emerged. They provided the voice; the novel: a place to hang them on.
2)
Besides being an author, you’re a funeral
director. Do you find that helping others deal with their grief emotionally
stressful? Is writing a way to deal with that?
I’m human so
I felt it from time to time. But I never forgot what I learned in mortuary
school: that the primary goal of the director is to be empathetic above all
else, and to not bring the work home with me at the end of the day. A director
is many things—artist, planner, communicator, and, most importantly, listener. When
I was at work, the grieving family always came first. But when I went home, my own
family took precedence. It’s a balancing act that I worked very hard at
maintaining. And it worked. That’s how I did the job for so many years.
Writing,
like funeral directing, was another calling that I had to follow. I carry
stories from my life growing up in Scarborough (Ontario), from working in youth
politics and later at the Legislature, and then four years with the auto lobby.
Good times, rich with all kinds of mirthful fiction. I saw novel writing as a
way of preserving some of this history. I’ve had a ball revisiting those times!
3)
So, “Scooter Nation” is said to be book two in
the “Unapologetic Lives” series. Tell us more about that. Will the same
characters be featured?
Unapologetic
lives and all that they imply came from two sources: some of the amazing people
I’ve met over the years and the off planet writing of Hunter S. Thompson. Both
sources keyed me in to the idea that messaging in novel writing can be
strengthened if the characters operate without filters. That is, they are not
governed by a societal rulebook of any kind. In reality, such a model would be disastrous—we’d
be barricaded behind our locked doors if everyone said and did what they
pleased. But in a world where this does not happen, where the sun rises the
next day and our skins remain intact, the unapologetic get heard, often with
comic results.
I’m working
on my fifth manuscript now, so I can tell you that some characters come back
either as living breathing people, or as memories to chew over in conversation.
Others live on in portraits; one loses her earthly body to the grave, but lives
on in essence inside a floor lamp. The joy of this series is that each book is
stand alone, giving me the freedom to write non-sequentially. So a character
that dies in 2017 at the end of book two is born in 1947 in chapter one of book
four. This works for me because it keeps me interested, and it also allows me
to comb over 20th century history, which is a favorite of mine.
4)
Do you have any plans of writing something in
another genre?
Anything can
happen. I never sit down with an idea that I’m going to consciously write a
romance or a paranormal or a horror/thriller. The characters decide that as the
story unfolds. I love being surprised by what they do.
5)
What are your overall writing goals? Would you
like to see your books on the big screen?
I have a
muse and that muse is incredibly strong. I’ve long believed that such a thing
can’t last forever, that I might wake up one morning and it will be gone. So my
goal is to get the stories down as fast as I can. Once I’ve said all that I
need to say, then I can luxuriate over the edits and make the stories richer,
fuller. That’s the real joy for me.
Whatever becomes of my stories I’ll leave to history. But you know what?
In getting them out there I know they’ll be there forever. We have the digital
age to thank for that. I thank it every day!
About the Author
A.B. Funkhauser is a funeral
director, classic car nut and wildlife enthusiast living in Ontario, Canada.
Like most funeral directors, she is governed by a strong sense of altruism
fueled by the belief that life chooses us and we not it. Her debut novel HEUER
LOST AND FOUND, released in April 2015 after five years of studious effort, has
inspired four other full length works and over a dozen short stories. SCOOTER
NATION, her sophomore effort, is part of her UNAPOLOGETIC LIVES series.
Funkhauser is currently working on POOR UNDERTAKER begun during NaNoWriMo 2014.
Other
Solstice Books By A.B. Funkhauser
HEUER LOST AND FOUND
Unrepentant cooze
hound lawyer Jürgen Heuer dies suddenly and unexpectedly in his litter-strewn
home. Undiscovered, he rages against God, Nazis, deep fryers and analogous
women who disappoint him.
At last found, he
is delivered to Weibigand Brothers Funeral Home, a ramshackle establishment
peopled with above average eccentrics, including boozy Enid, a former girl
friend with serious denial issues. With her help and the help of a wise
cracking spirit guide, Heuer will try to move on to the next plane. But before
he can do this, he must endure an inept embalming, feral whispers, and Enid’s
flawed recollections of their murky past.
PRAISE
"Funny, quirky, and sooooo different."
—Jo
Michaels, Jo Michaels Blog
“Eccentric and Funny. You have never read anything like
this book. It demands respect for the outrageous capacity of its author to
describe in detail human behavior around death."
—Charlene
Jones, author THE STAIN
“The macabre black comedy Heuer Lost And Found, written by A.B.
Funkhauser, is definitely a different sort of book! You will enjoy this
book with its mixture of horror and humour.”
—Diana
Harrison, Author ALWAYS AND FOREVER
“This beautifully written, quirky, sad, but also often humorous
story of Heuer and Enid gives us a glimpse into the fascinating, closed world
of the funeral director.”
—Yvonne
Hess, Charter Member, The Brooklin 7
“The book runs the gamut of emotions. One minute you want to cry
for the characters, the next you are uncontrollably laughing out loud, and your
husband is looking at you like you lost your mind, at least mine did.”
“The writing style is racy with no words wasted.”
—David
K. Bryant, Author TREAD CAREFULLY ON THE SEA
“For a story centered around death, it is full of life.”
—Rocky
Rochford, Author RISE OF ELOHIM CHRONICLES
“Like Breaking Bad’s Walter White, Heuer is not a likeable man,
but I somehow found myself rooting for him. A strange, complicated character.”
—Kasey
Balko, Pickering, Ontario
Raw, clever, organic, intriguing and morbid at the same time …
breathing life and laughter into a world of death.
—Josie
Montano, Author VEILED SECRETS
LINKS
Audio Interview:
