Surfing With Sharks

Colton Candide did some prison time a decade ago but managed to bounce back, only to find his efforts thwarted as his burgeoning bait and tackle shop fails under oppressive COVID lockdowns. His fiancée has been quarantined in El Salvador for weeks and by May their Los Angeles apartment has become Colton’s personal dungeon. He needs to get back to work, or fishing, surfing, and sailing, anything to escape this toxic existence and isolation threating to drive him crazy.

And there is an escape. Colton just can’t see it. All will come clear in a matter of months however, as the COVID pandemic, lockdowns, bankruptcy, riots, woke doxers, an indictment, and real and perceived ailments, aliens, and zombies all collude and conspire to torture and kill Colton…and make him a killer, a killer who finally gets his mind right and cures himself.

A plot, a conspiracy. That’s what it is. And Colton is consumed by it, his madness informed by conversations with Princess, an abandoned teddy bear he rescues in the aftermath of a riot.

This is the book woke cancel culture wants banned. A story of our times, the basic theme – a struggle against madness – timeless. Colton Candide is uniquely contemporary, his descent not only the result of his own flaws but realities within an unreal world that has gone insane. Colton may indeed cure himself, yet we must wonder if madness itself isn’t the cure.