The Warrior Saint
His face was ravaged by acne. He had a wooden hand and carried a derringer strapped to his penis. He was a devout Irish Catholic from Boston. He confessed his sins every Saturday night with tiny spiders crawling all over him. The good father went light on the penance–a few Hail Marys, the Apostle’s Creed, a couple of Our Fathers. What he dreaded most, the good father, was the next day at the communion rail. Each Sunday he took the host in a Dixie cup and skipped on out of the church groaning like a beast. Attendance at the noon mass dropped to nothing.
The good father handed it off to the Bishop, the Bishop sent it along to the Cardinal, and the Cardinal shot it straight up to the Pope.
Excommunication might spark a holy war, but sainthood had possibilities, if his canonization was kept hush-hush. The warrior saint with a bad case of acne and a cross to bear. He could be sent to Mecca on a black-ops pilgrimage. He could reclaim Jerusalem. He’d be a one-man Crusade, an avenging angel, and if the publicity went wrong, the Pope could disavow any knowledge of him. And he would take the heat off the pedophiles.
But before the Vatican could come up with an air-tight strategy, Obama got wind of him and nominated him for Secretary of Defense. The vote in Congress was overwhelmingly in his favor, tipping the balance of power in favor of those who had nothing to lose.
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…