john bennett | a pawn in the game

A Pawn in the Game

If you don’t know what game you’re playing you don’t know the rules. If you don’t know the rules you’re free to invent your own game. If you question that there is a game you’ve broken the cardinal rule of all games. There’s only one game, and we all play it.

You may think I’m making this us as I go along, but then you’re out of the game. How does that make you feel? Like life is purposeless and without meaning?

Purpose and meaning are not the same thing. What makes you think that? Are you out to sabotage the game? See how easily you can tip your hand? Here’s where the trouble starts.

You’re walking down the street with purpose. You have a destination, and you feel your life has meaning. Then you pause to light a stranger’s cigarette, and you get pulled into his game. You begin blurting out things you don’t mean, and your life gets robbed of purpose. You glance at your watch to indicate you have to get going, and you realize you’re playing a game. The stranger is delighted. He glances at his watch, too, and then he takes a long drag on his cigarette that you lit for him. “Are you game?” he says, and your life disappears in an intense flash of light.

click the Hcolom Press logo to visit the web page...HCOLOM PRESS is the heir to Vagabond Press, which began as a main player in the Mimeo Revolution of the Sixties and continued publishing right into the jaws of the new millennium. HCOLOM PRESS embodies the spirit of Vagabond Press, retooled for the times we live in.

Hcolom is Moloch spelled backwards. Moloch is an Old Testament deity to which children were sacrificed, a practice society still engages in with increased enthusiasm. Consumerism is the new Moloch, manifesting itself like cancer in war, politics, the arts and religion, in every nook and cranny of human endeavor, draining the intrinsic beauty out of life and mutilating the innocence and magic of childhood with its commercial meat hook. HCOLOM PRESS intends to publish books that by their nature repudiate this pernicious force–novels, poetry, children’s books and books that transcend genre.

Our launch book, in June of 2006, was John Bennett’s novel, Tire Grabbers, a fable of sorts, a reality book rooted in the fantasy of our times, the story of the coming of Moloch and the children who rise up in rebellion against it.

Books of kindred spirit will follow close on its heels. Go for it by clicking here… or hit the Hcolom logo above… or just hit any of the following covers…

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