Comic stories

Shredding Bells

A Comic Novel About Love, Rules, and Bad Math

He had rules for love. His mother didn’t.

Alex Salterman has a system. Four Rules for love, a few dozen sub-clauses, and a strict professional code from massage school. Date within five years of your own age. Never date a client. Choose the right inputs, and love takes care of itself.

Then his girlfriend, a former Israeli army commander, ends things with a roundhouse kick. Alex wakes up handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser, and his mother drives him home, straight back to the house he grew up in.

His old bedroom now belongs to Rick: twenty-two, bald, a metal guitarist. And after one ice cube and one pinky finger in the kitchen, it’s obvious Rick isn’t just the boarder.

Alex gives himself two weeks to get Rick out. Plan A goes through the babysitter who used to send him to bed before Cheers. Plan B leaves him “married” to a woman he met minutes earlier at a Honda dealership. Plan C involves a strip club.

The third plan works. That’s the problem.

Kindle and Paperback and Audiobook.