Lost Violent Souls

Andy Nowicki
Lost Violent Souls
San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2013
110 pages

OUT OF PRINT

What if . . . ?

What if an infamous presidential assassin lost his nerve at the crucial moment? What if a torrid affair between coworkers edged the adulterous couple closer to a terrible death? What if a desperate man and his alluring psychologist found that they shared a mysterious telepathic link? What would two men plotting a horrific act say to one another over breakfast? How might a gang of devious revolutionaries undermine a corrupt culture from within?

Find out in Lost Violent Souls, a collection of intense and provocative short stories by Andy Nowicki, author of The Columbine Pilgrim and Under the Nihil. In uncompromising prose that recalls Dostoyevsky and Flannery O’Connor, Nowicki takes aim at modern nihilism, tracing different routes to spiritual sustenance—from “senseless” violence to suicide—in a world bereft of meaning. Includes “Oswald Takes Aim,” the acclaimed JFK assassination counterfactual tale, and “The Wooden Buddha,” an unsettling exploration of the psychic devastation wrought by abortion, miscarriage, and barrenness.

Sample stories: “Oswald Takes Aim” and “Motel Man”

Praise for Lost Violent Souls:

“The five death-haunted stories in this collection all address the oldest and utmost question of the human mind—why live? I am aware of no writer, or at least none since Dostoyevsky, who has confronted this everlasting issue with more resolve (and more intelligence!) than this one.”

                              —Tito Perdue, author Morning Crafts and The Node

“In a galaxy far, far too here there was a fluctuating mess of a publishing industry where passionless shit floated to the top and having an actual opinion about anything made you a prole moron. Andy Nowicki is rapidly sinking to the bottom of this particular galaxy-toilet along with everything else of substance, weighted by a black hole’s worth of brilliant prose, angrily wielded. If Edgar Allan Poe had been more forthcoming about his masturbatory habits, he might have written something like this collection of eloquently agony-riddled pleas for sanity.”

—Ann Sterzinger, author of NVSQVAM (nowhere)

“Andy Nowicki excels as a writer precisely because despite his ideological biases, he can step outside of his own life and imagine what the world looks like from the perspective of people completely unlike himself. Additionally, Nowicki realizes that even in the most evil person imaginable, there is a flicker of goodness, a chance of regaining God’s grace. It is this hope of salvation, no matter how tiny and remote, that gives his fiction pathos and makes his characters believable.”

—Matt Forney, author of Trolling for a Living

About the Author

Andy Nowicki is the author of four novels: Considering Suicide (Nine-Banded Books, 2009), The Columbine Pilgrim (Counter-Currents, 2011), Under the Nihil (Counter-Currents, 2012), and Heart Killer (ER Books, 2012). He is also the author of another collection of short stories, The Doctor and the Heretic and Other Stories (Black Oak Media, 2011) and an essay on The Psychology of Liberalism: Character Study of a Political Movement (2002).

He is co-editor of Alternative Right (http://alternativeright.com/), to which he is a regular contributor. He has also written for several other print and online journals of social commentary, including The Last Ditch, Takimag.com, New Oxford Review, American Renaissance, and Counter-Currents/North American New Right. He lives in Savannah, Georgia.