One angry man, one devious Devil, one deranged God. Maybe jumping off this building wasn't such a good idea.
The State took everything Jake Blake ever cared about. Tonight, they want everything else.
Seattle. One man is trapped on the roof of a tall scraper downtown. Six angry agents are threatening to “remand him to Protection.” Jake knows that means he’ll be tortured and killed. Every citizen knows that.
Hiding and on the run for the past two years, for Jake, it’s the end of the lying. Now, there’s only one easy way down off this scraper, and getting captured and killed … isn’t it.
Welcome to a world where freedom means a citizen still has the power of choice. But most of those choices are between bad and worse.
The citizens of the future have assured their security … by giving up just about every freedom they ever had. And they also gave up the only means any one of them ever had to resist.
There are no more guns in Jake Blake’s version of eternity, buried or otherwise. And if there are? If a citizen does dig one up? Well, they might find themselves trapped between the “heaven” of a quick and easy death and the “hell” of a long and torturous judgement.
Because, as Jake likes to say to anyone who will listen to one of his rants, “Sooner or later the boot finds its way to everyone’s neck.”
But tonight is citizen Jake Blake’s sooner, and this time … the neck under that boot is his.
Revenge for the daughter they took. Right now, it’s about as tall an order as the top of this scraper. But depending on the last decision he’ll ever make as a man… Jake doesn’t know it yet, but the fate of this eternity—the one where he’s standing on the ledge of a forty-eight story building—hangs in the balance.
In and out of reality and nightmare, in the end, Jake must find his own absolution. His own faith.
But no matter what happens next, if he doesn't figure himself out, humanity has one day left.
The first in THE FALLEN series, JUMP is a fast-paced, action-packed thriller that explores the accepted beliefs of religion and reality against a backdrop of tyranny and dystopian existence.
Professional Reviews
Take a front row seat in the afterlife
Relax and enter an exquisitely created universe you'll thank your own God you're not a part of. But you can't help but want to get to know those who are.
Most of us have been taught a version of the war between Heaven and Hell. In JUMP: The Fallen - Testament 1, Steve Windsor offers up a decidedly dystopian look at a version of that ultimate showdown you'd never enter voluntarily, and does so in a beautifully drawn, fleshed-out prose that escorts you there, plops you down in a front-row seat in the "Arena of Reckoning," and makes you want to stay for the finish - as a spectator, of course.
This superbly-written first entry in "The Fallen" series begins in a Seattle you'll recognize even if you've never been there: cool, cloudy, overcast, rainy - and dark. Keep your eyes on that last one, because you're going to see a lot of it. You don't stay in Seattle. You travel far beyond into an infinity you first wish you didn't have to, but soon come to know you're meant to, until you desperately want to. Windsor's writing is so intense, so achingly, mind-blowingly real that you'll have to remind yourself this is a book. And you're not going to want to put it down for a second until the finish.
And thank God - or the Devil, or whoever's running things in this eternity, that this is just book one. So sprout your wings and save your seat; the ride's just beginning.
Jake Blake lives in a world the likes of which your great-great grandkids - if the population projection Windsor gives pans out - may face if the author's social, political and economic dystopia has even a tad of a chance of forming for real. A "citizen" and former agent of a government that makes "1984" look like a spring festival, Jake finds himself on the receiving end of this world's obsession with catching those who've hidden guns. Private firearms are forbidden. Period. Not just forbidden but undeniably, undoubtedly, decisively, distinctly, clearly, positively forbidden. And after initially playing the role of enforcer, Jake isn't having it anymore.
The reader is taken for a wild ride - or fall, as Windsor would have it - from Seattle high-rises to an afterlife where showdowns between good and evil are presented as not just war but the ultimate showmanship. Individual judgments take place in an arena with spectators. The Gods are expected to put on a good show and Windsor makes sure they do so.
Windsor's characterization is nothing less than brilliant. Jake can be called your hero but he's really your anti-hero. You end up rooting for him in spite of yourself. You realize early on that earthly life has become a world where Uncle Sam has metamorphosed into Uncle Satan, where the "Protection" squad consists of "the State's personal pit bulls of justice," where the rights of citizens were allowed to dissipate a long time ago, and where Jake's emotions are merely "a hop, skip and a jump to pissed off." Compared with most of his descriptions, that's gentle. He's not a happy camper, and regardless of where on a moral compass you put him, you wouldn't be either.
It doesn't take long for Jake, and the story, to sprout wings in a lively afterlife that perches the reader in a secure spot even while falling. You get a uniquely idiosyncratic version of the all-powerful "Life" - God, Supreme Being, whatever you want to call this ultimate entity, and also of the Devil or "Dal," the "Dark Angel of Light." And you get it with language that stays with you. Jake's priceless exchange with a momentarily forgetful Dal leaves you howling for more: "Leave it to me to arrive in Hell on the day the Devil gets Alzheimer's."
Much of what the millions of angel-spectators in the Arena of Reckoning witness is the "eternal" bickering between these two rulers of Heaven and Hell. Enjoy that worldly exchange while the story of the supremely skeptical Jake, who calls Dal "a conspiracy ranter after my own heart," and his family takes center stage. And again, notwithstanding his glaring cynicism and constant colorful cussing - or perhaps because of it - you find yourself rooting for this anti-hero and his far-more-moral wife and daughter for, let us say, a favored place in perpetuity.
Finally given a bit of power, Jake's gutting for revenge. Everyone who hurt him and his family has it coming. You root for him a tad less here, but you quickly pick it up again. Throughout the story you find yourself caring for this immensely flawed character whose four-letter words add a tangy flavor to the hills and halls of eternity. Not because what he does is good, but because Windsor has made him and those around him eminently ... human. For the reader, the challenge in JUMP is not what Jake has to contend with, but putting the effing book down to get to sleep at night.
Books 1 & 2 of Never Leave Your Monastery, both in one volume. This Collector's Edition features the ORIGINAL ART of the Author, over 25 hand-drawn illustrations.
Although available elsewhere; the author urges you
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