Kindle Edition
The Last Blog Name On Earth
Amazon
Category:
Action/Thriller
Type: Fiction
Pages: 80
Special Editions is the new short story collection from writer J.L. Hohler III
Special Editions is a quartet of short stories from J.L. Hohler III, touching on life, business, murder and the apocalypse:
The first, Sole Survivor At The End Of The World, explores oneunforeseen consequence of good luck. You Want Fries With That? takes a behind-the-scenes look at the first drive-thru funeral parlor in the Midwest. In The Piano looks at a marriage and divorce and a different, yet justified, kind of emotional catharsis. Finally, in the namesake of the collection, Special Editions, a man learns too late what happens when you cross a woman with a specialized skill.
Entertaining, thought provoking, humorous and morbid, Special Editions is the perfect nugget for any lover of fiction.
Kindle Edition includes a preview chapter of the new novel by J.L. Hohler III, Peck: A Book.
Excerpt
Red Givans opened Special Editions not long after his wife left, running off with a logger. She never came around after that, which suited Red, even if he worried the effect on his daughter, Mae. She was young then, impressionable, but also smart as a whip, and figured out right quick it was better for everybody else if her mother stayed gone. At least the fighting stopped.
Without a mother around, Red kept the girl near, spending most all of his free time with her. They were so close that when he opened the bookstore he treated her as a partner, ignoring her counsel just once, when it came to the name.
“You see, it’s a play on words,” he explained, when she turned her nose up at the sign above the door. “Books come in editions, and the best are special editions. And this is a bookstore, so it works on two levels. It’s really very clever, when you think about it.”
Mae did not think it clever, she thought it silly – especially given the fact they didn’t handle special editions of any sort – and no matter how many times he repeated it, she was never going to like it. But it didn’t matter what she thought. He liked the name, so it stayed.
Red opened the store because he loved books and even though it was a store he tended to treat it as a personal library, not a business. Somehow, though, he always managed to turn a profit and was careful to groom Mae for the day when he would retire to Florida, preferring to leave it in her hands than sell it to a stranger.
“One day, all of this will be yours,” he liked to say, with a fair amount of pride, over what he’d made. “It’s all for you.”
Red saw the store as Mae’s birthright; she did not share the sentiment. Her dream was to see the world, not sell books about it. But because it was expected she took it, spending the next several years buying it from him. She didn’t need to buy it, because he’d gladly give it to her free of charge, if she asked, but taking it as a gift seemed like cheating.
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