MALARKEY

What if Magical Realism came to San Francisco and nobody noticed?

When 17-year-old Andy Boyle climbs out of the street wreckage of the family VW van after it's broadsided by a truck in San Francisco's Cow Hollow neighborhood, his parents are dead and he's lost his memory of them in a thick blanket of traumatic amnesia. Plus, a mad, bad, and dangerous-to-know fantasy playmate with a dangerous sense of humor has popped back into his life in the guise of the novel's eponymous unreliable narrator Malarkey.

An oddly affectless teenager, Andy Boyle is the perfect foil for Malarkey who just wants to have a little fun by snookering Andy and his friends. As Malarkey gleefully explains 'I am but a humble messenger of ill tidings. And as for Hell, writ large or small? all I can say is that this world is more than enough fun for me.''

Caught up in a toxic relationship with a peripatetic wild-child girlfriend, Andy is running around in circles trying to contact his deceased parents, start college, manage the family's Cow Hollow house, and deal with his half-mad Uncle Finn who is calling for old-world Gaelic revenge for the death of his brother. Things are getting confusing and that's before the Loma Prieta earthquake and Andy and his girlfriend Siobhan going on the run from a bilious cop who wants to haul in Andy, or Uncle Finn, or all of them, for a crime that may, or may not, have ever happened.

Malarkey is a 52,000-word urban dark fantasy mashup of noire humor, the occult, and a police procedural gone very wrong.