Readers and writers blog

Ray Rhamey is mad. Like the TV anchor in the movie Network, he’s mad as hell. In fact, he is so mad that he wants to . . . well, do something nice for you.

Rhamey is offering one of his novels, We the Enemy, complete and free to any reader who requests it via email through wetheenemy@live.com.

The only price is that the book may make you think a little.

A former top advertising writer in Chicago, Rhamey was moved to his free-book campaign by the Valentine’s Day shooting at Northern Illinois University in which a heavily armed graduate student killed five and wounded at least 16 other students in a lecture hall before taking his own life.

Banning lethal firearms is a major theme in We the Enemy.

Rhamey, a freelance editor and blogger as well as a novelist, himself raises the image of fictional anchorman Howard Beale and his famous line from the 1976 movie: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more.”

“I’m mad as hell about the continuing slaughter of innocents with high-firepower lethal firearms,” Rhamey says in the Feb. 18 entry of his weblog, Flogging the Quill. “The tragic Northern Illinois University shooting will not be the last.”

Unlike Beale, who descends into ranting at the TV camera, Rhamey in his campaign to do something positive is more like a main character in his novel, Noah Stone, head of a group called the Alliance.

Stone’s group has been so successful at making social and political changes in Oregon that the book’s leading character, Jake Black, a former CIA operative and now freelance hit man, is enlisted by a rightwing president and various fundamentalists to cripple the group by eliminating Stone.

In the story, the Alliance has successfully challenged the Second Amendment by getting lethal firearms banned in Oregon in favor of nonlethal, defensive devices called ’stoppers’ that immobilize their human targets by firing tranquilizers, snares or irritants.

The Alliance also has successfully eliminated Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination in Oregon by getting the state’s courts to require witnesses to testify while hooked up to brain-fingerprinting computers that determine whether the testimony is true.

Although the technology of defensive weapons and brain fingerprinting now exists or is being developed, We the Enemy takes it into the future by making it nearly foolproof.

Thus, a suspense story that moves with the pace of a Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler mystery — and certainly with a title reminiscent of Mickey Spillane — becomes a bit of science fiction as well.

In fact, the novel opens with the words, “Not many years from now,” and goes on to tell us that National Rifle Association hero Charlton Heston has been killed in a drive-by shooting, that Soldier Field has been destroyed by a category-five tornado and that, in general, the world has become even more of a mess than it is now — even rap music “has no anger left, only whining defeat.”

Rhamey doesn’t want to accept defeat: “If this book can stimulate debate about what to do about lethal firearms, I’m duty-bound to somehow get it out there,” he tells his blog readers.

He’d like to see the book published on paper and says he’d forego any advance funds, asking instead that they be used for promotion. For more on the origins of the novel and his campaign, see the following special page on Flogging the Quill.

We’d like to see a paper version, too. If you don’t have a laptop, reading a book at a PC is less pleasant than in an easy chair.*

It doesn’t surprise us that Rhamey would offer a free book. On his weblog, one of our favorites on our blogroll (well, they’re all our favorites, really), he offers free advice and line-by-line editing to would-be novelists who submit the first 15 or 20 pages of their manuscript.

He’s a very good editor and a very good writer. We the Enemy is a fast-moving story with action, suspense and, yes, some polemics thrown in. All of it interesting and thought-provoking.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

*Actually, though, a computer can be helpful if you, as I do, sometimes have trouble keeping characters or facts straight. Previous references are easy to find with the search function.