Blackrose Avenue

by Mark Shepherd

 

Blackrose Avenue

by Mark Shepherd

Yard Dog Press

 

 

OMG! When I started this book, lots of feelings came over me. Even though this book is not a horror book, it was fear and trepidation that overshadowed me as I read the first several chapters. Why?

Because the story Shepherd tells could so very well be true.

Although written only a couple of years ago, the storyline is as applicable today as it was then. It is scary to see the stage being set in America today for what could be the future.

Shepherd takes the reader to a time when the Religious Right Party has taken over America, restructured the country and created a legalistic society. HIV/AIDS, ignored by past governments, now is rampant. Regular testing of its citizens, even permits to date and have sex, are all attempts to control the disease that is draining the country’s resources exponentially. Test positive? The police not only interrogate but immediately take the “carrier” to an internment camp, otherwise known as Avalon House.

But, as time goes by, the legalistic structure of the new government springs leaks, as the Right Party’s loyal members seem to slip here and there and come up positive themselves. Perhaps a vaccine or a cure (two different approaches with different consequences, a point well made in the story) is needed, but for who?

I applaud Shepherd for not sugar-coating a disease that is easily passed over as six letters. Shepherd familiarizes us with his characters, almost all HIV-positive. His lead character, Lorn, is heterosexual and was infected from unlicensed sex with a “known female carrier” he picked up at a bar. HIV/AIDS is a people disease and not a gay disease in this book, although the gay-straight friction does have its place as things get worse and worse as times goes by in the camps. And, as would be the case, many of the characters are gay.

Not only that, Shepherd carefully develops Lorn from an irresponsible, arrogant young man, who loved to show out and shock the staff and fellow patients, to a ring leader who looks death straight in the eye and comes out on the other side a changed man, literally. All thanks to an underground group of individuals who don’t speak out against the Right Party publicly, but whose actions bring hope to a few and ultimately to the masses.

Blackrose Avenue builds to the point when Lorn, so consumed by the disease (remember, if medications are being cut now, what the ultimate extreme case would be), decides to give into the subliminal messages and to take “the” shot offered at the camp. With a surprise, the latter part of the book seems to switch from a “horror” book to a “futuristic” book. However, I don’t wish to infer that the book is that simple; Shepherd does a fantastic job making me want to turn the pages and, just when I thought I had the next thing figured out, I was pleasantly informed I was wrong.

(as published in Family & Friends Magazine, February 2005, by Anita Moyt, editor)