EDGER – audio book
by David Beem
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GENRE: Comedy, Action/Adventure
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BLURB:
Meet Edger (Ed-jer), a twenty-six-year-old gadget retail dork destined to become the world’s first superhero! His superpower: the ability to channel the Collective Unconscious, a psychic network connecting the living and the dead. In his arsenal are the skills of Bruce Lee, the strength of Samson, the wisdom of the ages...and the dancing chops of Michael Jackson—including that one twisty foot move, crotch grab, and fedora tilt. But there's a catch... Like every psychic super power to get administered through a hypodermic needle, this one comes with a prick. Someone seems to have misplaced the booster necessary for stabilizing his superpower. Without it, Edger has three days before his brain turns to pudding. Join our Dork of Destiny as he overcomes the world’s greatest butt, two rival Cluck-n-Pray gangs, an evil cow, a Green Bay Defensive Tackle, rifle-toting assassins—and a pair of stoners who inadvertently create the world’s first supervillain after a wild night on Twitter!
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Excerpt
Water and glass shower the dance floor. Needle scratches vinyl. Hattori Hanzo seizes control of my body and I land with the grace of a ninja. Mary, who has no dead ninja in her head, thuds with the grace of a turkey carcass dropped from the Level Two parapet of Westfield Horton Plaza.
“Kill them!” someone yells.
“Don’t kill them!” I yell back, figuring that’s got to be worth a try.
Panic ensues. Screaming people run and duck for cover. Shots are fired. A bullet ricochets off a larger-than-life phosphorescent wallpaper image of Caleb’s crotch. I seize control of my body from Hanzo, grab Mary, and drag her behind a nearby couch.
More gunfire.
I chance a peek. Real life Caleb Montana is near the front door, exchanging shots with two Nostradamus agents behind a life-sized statue of Caleb in his quarterback uniform, one arm cocked back preparing to pass the football, and the other stretched out in front, pointing.
I round on Mary, who flings her wet hair back like a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model. Water sprays my visor.
“Cut me loose.”
“Right, right,” I say, feeling around on my utility belt. Jeez, I’ve never tried to locate anything without someone helping me from the Collective Unconscious. There are a lot of things here. I pull a tiny ball out—it grows into a switchblade-shaped object. Seems promising. I flick it on. Blue flame blows out from the end.
“Holy crap!”
“Come on, quit fooling round.”
“Don’t rush me! Do you have any idea how stressful this is?”
“Come on,” she says, her voice husky.
“There’s like, fifty thousand things on this belt, and they all look the same.”
“Just calm down.”
“You never see Batman having this problem is all I’m saying.”
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From The Author:
Beginnings:
Books
that Start with a Bang!
By
David Beem
The
Cow in the Porn Store. The Russian Hooker. Mission Unfathomable. These are
three prologue titles pulled from my action comedy trilogy, Edger, Edger
Lives, and Edger Forever.
Have
I got a thing for crude humor? No, not especially. You could say I’ve got a
thing for arresting beginnings. Things memorable. Things with implicit
questions.
Why
is there a cow in a porn store?
Who
is the Russian hooker?
What
is the unfathomable mission?
Good
writing is built on suspense, and suspense is built on implicit questions.
(And, conveniently for the writer, implicit questions also have a way of
getting pages turned.)
Edger
begins with the curious presence of a cow grazing in the middle of the El
Cerrito Adult Emporium. What it’s doing there is the question, but the
scene also poses other implicit questions. There’s the man in diving flippers
crashing over the lingerie rack in Aisle Two before firing a dart into the
cow’s butt… There’s the thief in Aisle Ten getting away with a blowup sex doll…
There’s the terrified owner of the store second-guessing his decision to stock
those DVDs titled: Graze Anatomy, Bovine Beauties, and I Think I’m in
Love with Moo…
Of
course, how these elements tie together (and how they supply the book’s through
line) is the reason we read. Arresting openers must arrest, after all. Rope
readers in from wherever they are, whatever they’ve been doing, and pause their
lives long enough to figure out just a little bit more of what’s going
on in your story. Oftentimes this means thwarting expectations. The Cow in the
Porn store is a reworking of the classic “wrong place, wrong time” trope. In Edger
Forever, readers will recognize the classic Mission Impossible “dangling on
a wire in a vault” trope—but the thwarted expectations are found in the who.
(Two stoners “as fully baked as a golden baklava placed on the center rack at
350 degrees for forty to forty-five minutes.” What are they doing there? What
are the stealing? Why are they stealing it?)
There
a zillion ways to write great, arresting openers. What are some of your
all-time favorites? Are you an author? What tips do you have for other authors?
Sound off in the comments below!
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AUTHOR Bio and Links:
David Beem loves superhero movies, taekwondo, and flossing. He lives in Djibouti with his family and crippling self-doubt. To help actualize David’s inner confidence, visit his website and buy all the stuff: www.davidbeem.com
Amazon author page: https://www.amazon.com/David-Beem/e/B005M4NEYI/
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David Beem will be awarding a $10 Amazon or BN GC to one randomly drawn commenter via Rafflecopter.
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