COVERING THE SPREAD is a contemporary fiction/thriller that depicts how former NBA hopeful, Jerome Jackson, falls from grace going from basketball glory to assembly line worker to eventual unemployed gambler. After losing his dream, job, and family, Jerome makes the extreme decision to seek revenge on the man he blames for taking it all from him; professional gambler, Richie Bank.   

Protagonist, Jerome Jackson, was rated by ESPN scouts as “a point guard that comes along only once a generation” and was quickly on his way to the NBA until a career ending knee injury left him just another African American struggling to support his wife and two young daughters on the tough streets of Detroit in an ever tougher economy. Despite his brutal upbringing, Jerome resists the illegal temptations that surround him and chooses to make an honest living working on the assembly line of a Flint, Michigan auto plant. Jerome’s decades of loyalty and dedication are rewarded by being fired. Too proud and embarrassed to tell his family, Jerome begins online gambling; masking his vice from his family by keeping his usual, daily routine. Jerome finds that he can provide more for his family via gambling by subscribing to well-known, professional gambler, Richie Bank’s website. That is, until he is deceived by Richie and loses everything, including his family. Fueled by alcohol, anger and revenge, Jerome loses his dignity and his mind. Overwhelmed by rage, Jerome kidnaps Richie Bank and holds him hostage in his basement, making him gamble for the highest stake there is; his life. Jerome forces Richie Bank to pick winners to stay alive, when the two form a peculiar bond which ends in tragedy triggered by the unlikeliest of characters.     

Where do dreams go to die?
 
In a world taken over by efficiency and a single corporation, dreams are stolen in the middle of the night. Discovering a machine that records their dreams, Caleb and Cyrus Scott pitch their idea to Matthew Keeper, the business tycoon atop of Dependence Incorporated in order to escape their fate as two poor and sick boys living in Brighter Days Orphanage. The pharmaceutical juggernaut and his sinister henchman eventually alter the machine’s ability from recording to stealing dreams. They use it to control those around them, and to save them from their own unrealized dreams and nightmares. The world becomes lifeless, destitute, and chaotic once Sunset city residents are fooled by the true functionality of the Dream Recorder. A small group of rogues led by Robin “Doc” Winter who live outside the grips of Dependence Incorporated and the lure of the Dream Recorder through barbiturates that keep them awake at all times fight to restore original thinking to the masses. In a world where one’s dreams are stolen, the people live in a lifeless haze devoid of aspirations, hope, and love. But is their hope to escape the cycle… to sleep, perchance to dream? That hope rests inside the mind of one child; the only child born in years, the child with the ability to have the dream to save all dreams.

© 2010  (Cover art by Joey Clements)

Forty Years in Forty Nights is the true story of how Tommy Strewzi and his diverse, close-knit group of friends experienced a lifetime of occurrences in four years of college together. It is a morbidly funny account about sex, drugs, life, mistakes, lessons learned, death, more sex, more drugs, and experimentation told by the descriptive tongue of Tommy Strewzi as he graphically remembers it through his dilated pupils. Follow along this journey with our wholesome protagonist to find out if he will survive balancing a life of full-time class, multiple girlfriends, a typical college experience, a job the government knows about, and becoming C.E.O of his underground operations all at once.

(Cover Art by Mike Witte)
© 2009