Macromere Press

Macromere: And then we came to the end. 

David: Of another dull and lurid year.

M: That may be true, but we meant the end of He Who Shall Remain Shameless, specifically the final episode in the novel, “Katherine”, which takes place on New Year’s Eve and continues to New Year’s Day. 

D: The continuation to New Year’s Day is debatable, but I thought an end-of-year conclusion would be fitting. I really did think while drafting this book of going past December 31st or January 1st and having David continue to pursue spirits whose deathiversaries fell in January, February, March, and so on until he came full circle to late June. David could have done an entire year of missions, but ultimately I felt it was wise to quit while I was ahead. As a writer I didn’t want to overplay my hand with this one. I believe HWSRS ends when and where it should. 

M: Anything you’d like to say about the ending? 

D: I had to dig deep to write this last story—and I don’t mean research. Throughout the novel David encounters spirits who can be found on the internet and those who can’t. To me it’s fitting that the final spirit is very much in the latter vein, and that through her we find the most out about David we’re probably ever going to know. 

M: You said ‘probably’. Does that mean….

D: That’s really it for David Michael Ewald and He Who Shall Remain Shameless. This book isn’t the first in a series; it’s a one-and-done novel in linked stories. I have no plans to write a sequel. 

M: We are looking into making He Who Shall Remain Shameless available in print sometime in 2012….

D: I appreciate that. I know there’s the rise of ereading—I just got a Kindle myself—but plenty of people prefer to hold the physical book, turn the pages, all that. Ereading and traditional reading should be able to coexist, and I’m happy plans are underway to put out a print edition of He Who Shall Remain Shameless, for all those who dislike reading a book on a screen. 

M: We’ll update our fans here, of course. In the meantime, Happy New Year, David, and Happy New Year to everyone reading this post. We hope 2012 proves to be joyous and prosperous for you all. 

Macromere: Merry Christmas.

David: Merry Christmas. We’re okay saying that? 

M: After reading “Radu”, we’d say we are.

D: It does take place on Christmas Day….

M: And this—the thirteenth and penultimate episode in He Who Shall Remain Shameless—has some religious overtones, we feel. There is, for example, that arresting line the Meritocrat has: “If you know God, don’t go outside.” Care to illuminate at all? 

D: I’m afraid I’m not going to be much help in the way of explaining either “Radu” or “Katherine” [the novel’s final episode]. I’ve never been one to reveal a lot of insight into my work. I’ve always been more of the “let the reader read into and take from it what they will” mindset. I am coming around to the fact that I’m going to have to explain more for a lot of situations, but I hope it’s okay if this situation is one of those where very little is explained. 

M: That’s fine with us. We appreciate ambiguity—and “Radu” has plenty of that. 

D: Things do come to a head here, but yeah, I’d say there’s still plenty left in the shadows. 

M: We get a bit more about the conflict between Ishmael and the Meritocrat that goes way back, and there’s insinuation that David’s parents’ demise may not be what it’s seemed for the previous twelve episodes….

D: That and the main themes driving the novel—all that I was able to draw out through the action and the dialog, but still, the reader’s going to have to piece the big picture together ultimately. 

M: Fair enough. 

D: I really do feel a lot of HWSRS is best left open to interpretation. But I will say I spent quite a bit of time with “Radu” to get it right. I’d initially intended to have this one feature the spirit of the former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, or Ceausescu’s son, or someone closely connected to the regime of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, and that was going to be the ultimate confrontation, with that particular ghost. But midway through writing “Radu” I knew this was it. I knew Radu was not a person but a thing, and that the featured spirit was the Meritocrat, and I knew the ultimate confrontation between David, Ishmael and the Meritocrat was going to take place in this episode, on Christmas Day. 

M: So you admit the Meritocrat is a ghost.

D: He’s a supernatural being. I wouldn’t say ghost. Ghost is too easy for what the Meritocrat is….He’s an idea. 

M: An idea. 

D: More than anything, he’s a movement, a force of the future, a compulsion, and those few who are aware of him and what he’s doing—what he’s making countries, nations, legions of people, entire generations do to the less fortunate—are the only ones who have any hope of stopping him. 

M: Stopping the meritocracy. 

D: Exactly. 

M: Do you think that’s possible? 

D: Stopping the meritocracy? I think the ending to “Radu” answers that question. 

M: “Radu” really does end with a bang, doesn’t it? 

D: There’s some whimpering from David about midway through, but other than that yes, I’d say it ends with a bang. 

M: How do you feel about Christ figures in literature? 

D: Um….

M: Just asking. After all, the Meritocrat makes the “If you know God…” comment, there’s the shape of the torture table in “Radu”, the fact that the thirteenth episode takes place on Christmas Day, and the title of the book itself. He Who Shall Remain Shameless—a play on He Who Shall Remain Nameless, right? 

D: Again, I’m going to plead no comment on this one, and say it’s time for me to open presents with my family. 

M: It’s time for us too. Thanks, David, for taking the time here with us. 

D: Thanks for giving me these opportunities. They’re very much appreciated. 

Macromere: We’re just about done with these interviews illuminating He Who Shall Remain Shameless, aren’t we?

David: That we are. We’ve almost run out of spirits.

M: So “Kordula”, the twelfth episode in HWSRS, starts off with the sentence “I was hiding out somewhere in the Czech Republic”. We take it you spent time in the Czech Republic…

D: I did. Winters were just as cold as what’s described in “Kordula”. And there is a Lake Prigl in Brno, the second-largest city in the Czech Republic, where the story takes place. Much of what David sees I also saw to an extent.

M: You’re a believer in writing from experience.

D: I believe you have to. Even if you’re writing strictly genre fiction, pure sci-fi or fantasy, I think for the work to succeed the writer has to have at least some of her- or himself wrapped up in it. The personalization may be well-masked, but it’s gotta be there for the work to resonate.

M: Tell us about the title character.

D: By this time in the narrative David has encountered all sorts of ghosts, from the somewhat well-known like Harriet Quimby and Leo Ryan and Christine Chubbuck to the lesser known like Christopher Coe and Linda Gary, and finally to the very little known like Alice Scribner and the infant David Michael Ewald from Gladwin, Michigan. Kordula falls into that last category, the category of those who have pretty much nothing going for them on the Internet. Kordula in fact may be the lowest-ranked of them all, as she has not even a sentence about her on the Internet. She’s representative of the spirits who are most in danger from the Meritocrat’s decisions—those spirits who are most susceptible to being erased, forgotten. 

M: We find it interesting that Kordula does not want to be remembered.

D: She really doesn’t. She rejects the nature and purpose of David’s missions. And she puts our hero and narrator in grave danger.

M: The stakes are certainly high in this one.

D: The stakes are high in all the episodes, really, but in “Kordula” David has his sights set on the Meritocrat, and that ultimate confrontation is right around the corner….

M: If the Czech’s Saint Mikulos were to visit you today with an angel on one side and a devil on the other, which would side with you, the angel or the devil?

D: Let’s wait until we get to the conclusion of He Who Shall Remain Shameless before I answer that one.

Macromere: Like King Aegeus (“Aegeus”, the sixth story), Arthur Conley, the title character of the eleventh episode in He Who Shall Remain Shameless, is something of an anomaly. David even says at one point that this singer who made his mark with his one hit “Sweet Soul Music” in the late ’60s is “certainly the most well-off spirit” he’s encountered.

David: Very true. Aegeus is different from the other spirits in the novel because he comes from such an ancient, faraway time, and so nothing David brings to him is familiar. Mr. Conley is different in a way as well because of how recently he died….”well-off” in the novel’s sense means Arthur is not only materially wealthy but mentally wealthy as well. He is, in fact, the only spirit in HWSRS who already has an idea of what the Internet is capable of. He has an advantage because he’s aware.

M: It seems, really, that David is using Arthur Conley here….

D: Definitely. The story itself follows “Leo” in the sense of that narrative arc continuing to sharpen. In David’s mind even Arthur Conley, despite his popular song and his substantial presence on the Internet, could use some help in the social networking department…but the main point of David’s adventure in the Netherlands is to turn the tables on the Meritocrat, who actually supports Mr. Conley.

M: We found that interesting—how the Meritocrat seems to not want to erase the memory of Arthur Conley.

D: Mr. Conley is one who could ultimately survive, but David’s plan involves a twisting of that memory that the Meritocrat cannot tolerate, and so the trap is set.

M: How much research went into “Arthur”?

D: A fair amount. I’ve always liked “Sweet Soul Music”, and over time I began to wonder about the singer. Who had sung this song? I would hear it playing overhead in stores, or on oldies radio, and I eventually decided to look up the artist. I was surprised to find that Arthur Conley had a fascinating and somewhat sad history I felt was worth incorporating into He Who Shall Remain Shameless.

M: “Arthur” currently is the only audio file available on the Audio page of your website….

D: Yes. There used to be plenty of others, pretty much the entire novel really, but as changes were made to the nearly published manuscript I decided to take most of them down—all except for “Arthur”. For anyone who’d like to listen to Matt Gunnison’s great reading of this story, click here. The audio version of the story is somewhat abridged, and the play button does take some time to appear, but it’s worth listening to because of Mr. Gunnison’s singing and his use of Dutch.

M: He sings and speaks Dutch, eh?

D: My wife was a big help with the Dutch, but the parody of “Sweet Soul Music”, “Sweet Arthur Conley”, is all on me. I wrote the first draft of it in an airport lounge. I felt a bit like David there, waiting to travel to his next mission.

Macromere: What’s most striking to us about “Leo”, the tenth episode in He Who Shall Remain Shameless, is that the title subject seems to take a back seat to the increasing tension between David and the Meritocrat. It seems really that the Meritocrat is a stronger presence than Leo Ryan in this story.

David: That’s true to an extent. The story is still entitled “Leo”, though, not “Meritocrat”, so I’d like to give credit where credit’s due.

M: By all means….

D: Leo Ryan was of course the impetus for this episode, which didn’t come about until after several of the other stories had been written. I’d been interested in Mr. Ryan for years mainly because of his tragic connection to the events that occurred at Jonestown, Guyana, on November 18, 1978.

M: The Jonestown Massacre.

D: Correct. My interest in the massacre itself came first, and then I found out about Leo Ryan. I was haunted by the fact that a U.S. Congressman, the kind of person I’d always thought of as untouchable, invincible in this kind of situation, could be gunned down so violently and remorselessly. It was as if titles and status and positions and political power no longer mattered. Like: “Oh, you’re U.S. Representative? Big deal!” The Congressional Seal of Protection is referred to in the story, and I do believe Congressman Ryan had faith till the very end that this seal would save him.

M: A 2006 documentary—Jonestown: The Life and Death of People’s Temple—factors greatly into “Leo”.

D: I watched that documentary before I had any idea of writing “Leo”. After watching I knew I wanted to do something with it. The film unnerved me quite a bit, especially the footage leading immediately up to the shootings on the Port Kaituma air strip. Watching I thought, I know what’s going to happen, but they don’t. And with Leo Ryan I thought, I am watching a dead man, or a man who’s about to die. He’s alive now, in a sense. That also shook me up.

M: The documentary as an outlet for voyeurism….

D: I did have the feeling I shouldn’t be watching this, and that feeling led to the idea of this being a film that had been reviewed and marketed and distributed and sold. And I thought, Can we really criticize this footage? Can these scenes be considered scenes in the fictional sense? What if these scenes could be improved for maximum audience satisfaction and reach?

M: David shows a bit of his own Meritocrat side here, it seems.

D: The way David sees it is that in death Representative Leo Ryan became one of us, an average public citizen, just another victim of Jim Jones and his cult of personality. But there’s tension there as well, seeing as Leo Ryan is one of the better known—if not the best known—of Jim Jones’s victims. That Mr. Ryan remains the only Congressperson murdered in the line of duty cannot be ignored, and the idea that one of these mighty politicians actually put himself out there and descended to our level is something that David wants everyone to know and remember. So much about the Jonestown tragedy has focused on Jim Jones himself or the so-called Killer Kool-Aid. Leo Ryan was known, but in David’s mind he is, like countless other ghosts, at serious risk of fading.

M: We’d like to go back to our initial point: the Meritocrat seems to be more of a character, or a presence, than Leo Ryan. Could this story really be about the Meritocrat? 

D: That story is still to come, but yes, I agree that the Meritocrat is very much a strong character in “Leo”. My intention in writing He Who Shall Remain Shameless was not to hit the reader over the head with the Meritocrat at every turn but rather keep this entity waiting at all times, hovering about, looking for a chance to strike or otherwise meddle in David’s missions. In some stories such as “David” and “Andrew”, the Meritocrat is very much there, seen and heard as well as felt, but in others, such as “Chris” and “Aegeus” and “Alice”, he’s not much of a physical presence at all, and the reader must anticipate the ultimate confrontation, which is what “Leo” sets up in the end.

M: About that ultimate confrontation….

D: We’ll get there, but while researching and writing “Leo” I knew I had to start curving the overall narrative arc more sharply—to move us more quickly in the direction of that big showdown. That’s perhaps the strongest presence of all in “Leo”—the awareness that the major question driving the novel—Will David defeat the Meritocrat, or will the Meritocrat defeat David?—is going to be answered within the next few episodes. 

It’s November 1st, All Saints’ Day, which means it’s time to announce the winner of the He Who Shall Remain Shameless Coffin Hop contest!

Congratulations go to our winner, Elizabeth Twist, who submitted the following entry:

“As for a real historical figure whom I would like to see as an apparition in [He Who Shall Remain Shameless], my recommendation is Bernd Jürgen Brandes, the German man who was murdered and eaten by Armin Meiwes, the ‘Rotenburg Cannibal,’ in 2001. Do you remember this case?

“Via a cannibal enthusiast website, Meiwes advertised that he was looking for someone who would volunteer to be cannibalized. Bernd Jürgen Brandes was that man. Brandes was apparently a full and willing participant in the entire process. The two of them recorded on video their initial attempt to eat Brandes’s severed penis. Meiwes subsequently killed Brandes and, over the next 10 months, ate a large quantity of him. Because Brandes allegedly asked to be killed, Meiwes was convicted of manslaughter, not murder. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armin_Meiwes) 

” ‘Why?’ is obviously a central question in this case. It’s almost impossible to comprehend what motivated Meiwes, but even more interesting I think is what could possibly have motivated Brandes. It seems that something superseded any sense of self-preservation. What is that something? What desire or need made Brandes do what he did? Why would a person want to be eaten? Inquiring minds want to know.”

After discussing with David Ewald, author of He Who Shall Remain Shameless, we agreed that this was definitely the strongest entry we received. Ms. Twist will receive a $5 Amazon gift card to be used on anything she likes!

We’d like to thank all those who participated in the Coffin Hop contest this past week. Happy All Saints’ Day to the living and the dead!

Macromere: In “Alice”, the ninth episode in He Who Shall Remain Shameless, it seems that one of the major themes driving the novel in stories is fully realized. You have a real-life flight attendant, possibly the first ever killed in a plane crash in America, but so little is known about her, or available about her on the Internet.

David: It’s true. Researching this one was difficult. It started, of course, with my interest in early aviation, and I’d read about this plane crash that occurred on the night of October 10, 1933 in northern Indiana, over a little town called Chesterton to be exact. What caught my attention of course was that the plane, with only seven people on it, had possibly been brought down by an explosive, which would make it the first-ever act of airline terrorism in America. It’s still a mystery, though, because the bombing was never verified, and speculation also existed that ammunition and other equipment brought on by a passenger who was a hunter combined during flight in such a way to cause an accidental explosion in the cargo hold. Regardless, I doubt the case’ll ever be solved. But what sealed the event for me in terms of HWSRS was, as always, the human element: Alice Scribner, the lone flight attendant, only twenty-six years old and on her way to meet her fiance who was waiting for her at the airport in Chicago. 

M: And the fact that there’s so little information on Alice Scribner….

D: Works well with the theme you alluded to earlier. Alice Scribner is a perfect fit for one of David’s missions because she is so little known. When searched for on the Internet, other Alice Scribners come up but not this particular Alice Scribner—at least not immediately. I had to do a lot of searching, and researching, and even then I could find only a few sentences. But this worked for writing the story as part of He Who Shall Remain Shameless. One of David’s main goals is to get a picture of Ms. Scribner on the Internet—because currently nothing’s there. This troubles David greatly. Alice Scribner has even less of a presence than the baby David Michael Ewald of Gladwin, Michigan. He wants to help this deceased flight attendant tell her story to the world, because absolutely none of it’s there right now. At least something should be there, he feels. 

M: As one reviewer puts it, “Alice” is particularly strong because in it David truly feels for the ghost he’s trying to help. 

D: He has to. He doesn’t want a repeat of what happened with Linda Gary, and he knows the Meritocrat is ready to thwart him at any moment. His flying, talking, laser-blasting cell phone companion Ishmael has advised him to actually talk with people, the living as well as the dead, and “Alice” is David’s attempt to turn things around. He does feel on a certain level for each ghost he encounters in this novel, but with Alice it’s a palpable emotional connection, especially at the end. 

M: We do very much like the conclusion to this one. 

D: Thanks. I tried. 

Macromere: Linda Gary….

David: Linda Gary, “sometimes miscredited as Linda Gray.” She died sixteen years ago today, October 5th, of brain cancer.

M: And her ghost is the eighth David encounters in He Who Shall Remain Shameless.

D: “I was in Los Angeles to get her to sign the contract….”

M: Why Linda Gary?

D: For me, Linda Gary took on a mythic quality….Of course I’m going to date myself here, but I grew up watching those early- to mid-’80s cartoons in which Ms. Gary’s voice was prominently featured. Nostalgia can be a killer, and I think that’s a lot of what “Linda”, the eighth episode in HWSRS, is about, but I couldn’t help as I grew older thinking about the people behind the characters….I wondered, Who was Linda Gary? At that time I couldn’t find any pictures of her, anywhere. I had no idea what she looked like. When I was younger I thought she probably looked like Tela, one of the characters she gave voice to in He-Man: Masters of the Universe. Eventually I found out she had died, and that she had died relatively young. I had to find out more.

M: We’re getting some echoes of Christine Chubbuck here.

D: That mythic quality, the fact that early on in the age of the domesticated Internet nothing much was available on Ms. Gary and Ms. Chubbuck….that lack of information contributed to an air of mystery, and gave them greater significance in my young mind.

M: Unlike Christine Chubbuck though, there’s still not much out there on Linda Gary.

D: It’s how it should be. Linda Gary did not commit suicide. She did not die in an airplane accident. She died of a disease, and that persistent lack of detail is what also drives “Linda” in HWSRS.

M: Mind explaining?

D: “Linda” is where the narrative turns in on itself and the nature of David’s missions is questioned. As in: Is what he’s doing right? What is the truth, and what is he making up for his own purposes? With a lack of information, in this age, does he have a right to make things up? Does anyone? Can he tell his story without knowing all the details, all that really happened? 

M: Sounds like you had to tread carefully with this one.

D: I had to tread carefully with all of them, but, yeah, “Linda” especially. I felt it was a good point in the narrative to call into question the book itself. My hope is that what drives “Linda” will go beyond even the book—to us. 

Macromere: Why Andrew Kehoe, the seventh ghost encountered in He Who Shall Remain Shameless? 

David: This particular story went through a lot of changes. A whole slew of rewrites. Two things remained constant, though: the opening sentence—“I was on campus to stop a massacre”—and the fact that the story takes place at the end of September, “goodbye-to-Maggie-May time”. Other than that, the first draft of “Andrew” wasn’t called “Andrew” at all. It was entitled “Tuma”, a word or name I’d picked up while living overseas, and the first draft didn’t have a ghost but rather a real-life, flesh-and-blood active shooter on a college campus. This active shooter was unnamed and unidentifiable, a kind of EveryKiller. The title was a throwaway, indicative more of the idea propelling the piece than anything. But early on that was David’s mission—to stop this active shooter from shooting up the campus. In this early, very rough version I was going for satire bar-none, to the point where the narrator brings a cache of loaded guns onto campus and tries to distribute them to terrified students, urging them to take up arms and shoot the active shooter before they are shot. Did this version work? Absolutely not. It was all about the idea, and the idea was arch, overly political and, frankly, not very interesting. What I needed was a person, a ghost, an historical figure that would fit with the rest of HWSRS. I wanted to keep the campus setting and the premise, but I didn’t feel comfortable writing about Seung-Hui Cho [the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007], and no way was I going to touch Columbine. I decided to look back….

M: And you came up with Kehoe, who remains the worst campus mass murderer in American history.

D: I know what you’re getting at: The other spirits in He Who Shall Remain Shameless are more benign…or at the very least David is trying to save them, help them, whereas he’s not so much helping Andrew Kehoe as he is helping the people of Bath, Michigan. So “Andrew” remains a bit of an anomaly compared to the other stories in the novel…it was always going to stand apart somewhat. But it works—

M: It does work.

D: It really is a major turning point in the novel. In “Andrew” the reader meets David’s crucial companion, the All-In-One Ishmael, for the first time, and the forward momentum of the final showdown with the Meritocrat is fully realized.

M: How much research did you do, when you’d finally decided on Andrew Kehoe for your subject?

D: A substantial amount of research. I wanted to get it right, and above all I wanted to make the story about the victims, the citizens of Bath as well as Kehoe. A primary source was “The Bath School Disaster”, a book written shortly after the tragedy by MJ Ellsworth. One website in particular, run by a descendant of one of the victims of the May 18, 1927 school bombing, was a great help. Reading the names and bios of all the children and adults who had perished that day really took “Andrew” to the level it needed to reach….the story found an emotional core.

Macromere: Thoughts on “Aegeus”, the sixth episode in He Who Shall Remain Shameless?

David: “It was sunny mid-September….” is how David Michael Ewald puts it, but this is really just speculation. The narrator of HWSRS successfully calculates that King Aegeus died in September, but to be honest there’s actually no proof that it was September. It could have been May. It could have been January. September works well in the novel, though. And there’s also no way of knowing exactly when Aegeus was born and when he died. He definitely died an old man, but how old, and when, we’re not sure. One voice on the Internet puts his birth—and probably his death—in the 1200s BCE, but, again, nothing is certain.

M: Why Aegeus?

D: His story’s always fascinated me. As a kid I loved Greek mythology. I figure a lot of people can say that but I’m unaware of many people—if any—who have dealt with Aegeus’s death in fiction. Pretty much everything I’ve encountered focuses on Theseus’s adventures, and Aegeus’s unfortunate suicide is simply a coda to those adventures. A lot of what I’ve read goes something like, “…Theseus left the island of Naxos and continued toward home. His father, Aegeus, was perched up at the top of a high cliff overlooking the ocean. When the ship appeared on the horizon Aegeus saw that the sail was black, and, in despair at his son’s death, he threw himself into the sea that now bears his name, the Aegean.” It seemed so terrible to me, such a tragedy, that a father would kill himself because of a mistake like that.

M: Theseus forgot to switch sails….

D: If he had remembered to put up the white sail, claiming victory, his father would have lived. But instead the son forgot, and the father mistook that black sail as a sign of his son’s death, and that was that. It was such a simple mistake on Theseus’s part, and yet it led to his father’s death.

M: In a way then, this story is thematically similar to “Harriet”….the mistake that William Willard made by shifting his weight too far forward in the plane, which then caused Harriet and him to both fall out at such a height. When we read “Aegeus”, we think of that line in “Harriet” David says to William Willard: “And by committing suicide you murdered Harriet Quimby.”

D: There’s definitely that connection to be made. Another element among many at work in HWSRS is the idea of feckless deaths, or deaths that could have been easily averted had something slightly different happened, someone had come in at the right time, or hadn’t taken a small action that turned out to cost another person their life. But it’s not just about death; it’s also about love, and what amazed me about that part of Theseus’s adventures was the love his father obviously had for him. I mean here was a father willing to kill himself because his son had died. There must have been so much guilt weighing on Aegeus for allowing his son to leave to go fight the minotaur. He couldn’t live with the role he had taken in his son’s supposed failure and death.

M: Have you been to Greece?

D: I have. When I went I had no idea I would write about it the way I did, that some of my experiences would go into “Aegeus”, but I like that melding of the fantastical and the contemporary, the common.

M: This story appears to be somewhat of a turning point in the novel. David’s laptop, for one….

D: Yes, the laptop: a 21st century tragedy. But in “Andrew” we’ll see that it was for the best.

M: How do you say ‘thanks for your time’ in Greek?

D: I have no idea.

Macromere: Since today, September 6th, is the 17th anniversary—or deathiversary, as we should now be calling it—of Christopher Coe’s passing, would you mind telling us about “Christopher”?

David: Not at all. “Christopher” was one of the early ones in the genesis of He Who Shall Remain Shameless. It was written after “Chris” and “Harriet”, and I’m pretty sure it was actually the third story out of all of them to be written. I felt I had something with the concept and themes behind the first two stories, so I thought I’d keep going. I wasn’t sure who was next until I was alone in a classroom at San Francisco State University, where I was then taking some classes for a graduate certificate in post-secondary teaching, and I scanned the bookshelves. I always scan bookshelves when I’m in a room. Anyway, there was a lot of fiction on these shelves, books that no one had picked up or held or otherwise touched in a good long time, and one of the spines was very thin. It stood out to me because it was a Vintage Contemporaries paperback—you know, the ones from the eighties and early nineties that have a very specific design, quite sleek and respectful.

M: They don’t make ‘em like they used to.

D: I took this slim volume down and it was I Look Divine by Christopher Coe. I’d never heard of Christopher Coe. His author photo in the front of the book was haunting. He wasn’t exactly looking to the side, but his head was turned from a direct confrontation with the camera, and he looked as if he didn’t really want his picture taken. I couldn’t tell if he was smiling or if he was about to cry. I felt a strong sense of tragedy in this photo, a tragedy that continued into the work itself.

M: We’re ashamed to admit none of us have read I Look Divine yet.

D: You should. It’s a good book. Highly unsettling. Very short. It’s shortness was the thing that struck me the most about it. It’s a novel, but at only 109 pages in paperback format it could really be considered a novella. It works as a novel, though, and it works well. I mean, is He Who Shall Remain Shameless a novel or is it a short story collection?

M: We say it’s a novel. A novel in stories.

D: But is that just a fancy way of saying a linked short story collection?

M: Maybe….Does it matter?

D: Probably not. Sooo…I was fascinated by Christopher Coe, and I decided to research him. I couldn’t find much. But his life, what little of it there was available for the public, what more of it could be created and thus saved by the David Michael Ewald of He Who Shall Remain Shameless, that was worth writing about. So I wrote a new encounter that became “Christopher”. 

M: It’s certainly the shortest of all the stories in HWSRS.

D: It is. Just under 2,000 words. I remember submitting it to the online magazine Morbid Outlook because they wouldn’t accept any story over 2,000 words. And Morbid Outlook accepted it. No changes were made to the submitted story, but significant changes were made between the story published in Morbid Outlook and the version included in He Who Shall Remain Shameless.

M: Such as….

D: Such as an expansion of this idea that drives the entire novel, or novel in stories: Other people on the Internet have Christopher Coe’s name, and David Michael Ewald the narrator and hero is afraid that the Christopher Coe of I Look Divine and Such Times will be replaced permanently by all those other Christopher Coes, even Christopher Coes that have yet to be born. That’s what it means to be ‘Internet dead.’

M: Replaced on the Internet, erased from the Internet—and thus from all public memory. Forgotten in the worst way possible.

D: You got it.

M: A big part of “Christopher” seems to be the discussion of one’s art, and how one’s art may not be enough to sustain the memory of the artist.

D: Exactly. Certainly Mr. Coe’s two novels are out there, but he died tragically before he could write and publish more, and in this meritocracy we now live in, I—like the David Michael Ewald of HWSRS—felt it’s a tragedy to have to be ranked, and therefore judged, in this way.

M: So it comes down to sales rankings.

D: It shouldn’t have to, but that’s one of David Michael Ewald’s biggest sticking points with the Christopher Coe of “Christopher”. The sales rankings of those two novels have to increase, or else.

M: What about your own sales rankings, the ones for He Who Shall Remain Shameless?

D: Believe me: I’m prepared to join Christopher Coe.

M: As are we. Thanks for taking the time etcetera etcetera.

D: Etcetera.

Macromere: The fourth episode in He Who Shall Remain Shameless takes place on August 18th, and it centers on, of all ghosts, a four-day-old baby named David Michael Ewald. You say this baby actually existed….Who was he?

David: I really don’t know all that much about the David Michael Ewald who was probably born on August 14th and definitely died on August 18, 1954, only four days old according to the one webpage I found. That’s part of the point of the story, actually. Like me, the David Michael Ewald who narrates He Who Shall Remain Shameless—

M: You mean the adult protagonist of the novel, right?

D: That’s right. That David Michael Ewald, the hero and narrator of He Who Shall Remain Shameless, also found only one webpage listing very little detail about the death of this four-day-old David Michael Ewald in the summer of 1954, in Gladwin, Michigan. And so, driven by the guilt of knowing his namesake could be a primary cause for this baby being forgotten forever, he makes the deceased David Michael Ewald his next mission. 

M: We must say, the first three stories in the novel are fairly straightforward, but this one goes off the deep end, IOHO—in a good way, of course.

D: Thanks. I’ll take that as a compliment.

M: The narrative gets quite meta at that point. After all, there’s the hero and narrator David Michael Ewald, the ghost of the deceased infant David Michael Ewald, some mention of you, the “little-known writer living in Denver” David Michael Ewald…and are there more David Michael Ewalds?

D: I don’t live in Denver now, so that “little-known writer living in Denver” could be another David Michael Ewald, and beyond that there’s the possibility of more David Michael Ewalds, waiting to intrude at any time.

M: You mentioned earlier that this story was one of the most overhauled from first draft to last.

D: Definitely. In the original version there was no Meritocrat, who makes his first full appearance in this one, and there weren’t any appearances by Christine Chubbuck or Harriet Quimby or Ai’dah either. It was pretty much just David Michael Ewald going to this house in Gladwin, Michigan to talk to the ghost of David Michael Ewald. That first draft was static, and it wasn’t until I got some feedback from my friend Blake Sanz that I was able to move the story in the direction it needed to go. Even then, this was one of the toughest to write.

M: John Kerry once said that googling yourself is a sin. Any comment?

D: I’m a sinner, but not half the sinner that the David Michael Ewald of He Who Shall Remain Shameless is. After “David”, the tragedy of his character becomes progressively more apparent.

M: As always—

D: No need to say another word. It’s my pleasure.

may we point you to the Kobo page for He Who Shall Remain Shameless:

He Who Shall Remain Shameless available on Kobo eReader

Just one more format for David Ewald’s paranormal adventure novel in stories!