Bubbles From Atlantis

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New Orleans is a bum and an angel, a devil and a wastrel, a genius, monster, moron and master. It is pearl-white mansions and crack houses in flames. It is song and dance and slashing knives and gats. Dark wisdom, enlightenment, cool-night brass bands and scorching summer crawfish boils. I caught a firefly with my mouth the other day. My name is Jack-O-Lantern and I sit on the front stoop smiling for the parentless children hopscotching on broken-glass sidewalks. I am the ruin and undying hope of the last-gasp offspring of our crumbling memories.”

Bubbles from Atlantis is a violent scream for help and a firsthand account of life in New Orleans during the first year after Hurricane Katrina. It is a mixture of memoir-style hallucinations and straightforward journalism, a full-throated proclamation of survival and a funeral dirge, the bleeding soundtrack of the post-apocalyptic city.
One month after the storm, the author, a local journalist, returns to New Orleans, to a militarized, childless town overrun by a rogue police force and populated by dead-eyed survivors, swarms of new-breed insects and the confused, wailing souls of the departed. It is a city tortured by a lingering evil that infects the nurseries and nursing homes alike, tormenting the drunks and saints and wannabe sinners.
As time creeps forward, drawing closer to the one-year anniversary of the storm, New Orleans falls under the spell of racist elves, murder-happy babies strapped with AK-47s, and tender dreams of mass suicide.
Bubbles from Atlantis chronicles the author’s struggle to make sense of the tragedy swirling around him as he becomes increasingly unhinged, addicted, psychotic and, eventually, paranoid enough to construct a private tomb out of beer bottles and rage.
This is the real story of what it meant to live in New Orleans after Mother Nature made love with the Devil.
“I ain’t saying there’s no hope but hope better wear a flak jacket.”