In terms of plot, “Phantom Effect” is a serial killer tale that moves to the supernatural as murderer Jonathan Martin Delaware Deseronto winds up being forced by the ghost of his last victim, the lovely co-ed Marissa Madison, to relive her last week inside her, as her, and therefore find out what it is like to be stalked by himself. Still, the issue so easily lost in the thunder and scatter is the fact that a large part of the story centers on music.
Plainly, my beautiful victim Marissa Madison in life was a psychic, able to read you on sight and figure out how to make you a better you. Through time, she shied away from sports since they so easily led to organized crime, and therefore went with the arts, mainly popular music. Her love interest is a young man named Jerome Anthony Franklin, he who she helped make into an overnight sensation, attacking the high school assembly circuit in the inner city with Hip-Hop fashion and a falsetto voice that made the girls swoon. In terms of promotion, she took a page out of the Justin Bieber playbook and got him a number one hit on the billboard charts with a cell phone video.
Of course there is a crash and burn, and one of the more haunting mysteries of the piece, only resolved finally through the intertwining plot-lines and time-shifts, remains the idea that someone truly psychic could manufacture such failure. It gives the book a human quality, keeping us grounded, ironically, in the familiar and tragic rite of passage we all go through in one form or another, learning how to take shattered dreams and reanimate them into something we can finally use.
In all, while “Phantom Effect” might very well be my most risky piece, it similarly offers proportion. It has a killer and his grisly tools, a victim and her psychic prowess, and a structural writing scheme many musicians would call “progressive” and “unconventional.” The fact that the murderer’s very tools help carve his own doom, the victim’s powers make violence seem lame, and my odd use of literary devices mirrors the dissonance one experiences when his heavenly vocals fail to sell records, indicates that maybe I am at a point in my career where just a good plot didn’t cut it. To achieve that “good beat you can dance to,” I had to take risks with the layering and perspective, and above all, I felt I had to challenge convention.
I hope you like the story and would let me know if you think it is a success. “Phantom Effect” is my 3rd novel, and was released from Night Shade Books on February 2nd, 2016.
I can be reached on my Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/maronovitz2 and my Blog, “The Author’s Graveyard,” is updated regularly with news: http://michaelaronovitz.com/
