December 2009
10 posts
Tonight, we let the whipped cream flow!
Brrr! Is it getting drafty in here, or is it just my icy contempt for the literary skills of certain NFL placekickers?
We rejoin Todd Penner as he’s using his hard-earned business school acumen to negotiate some pure profit from Manny, the head concessions guy: hot cocoa style! (Concessionaire? Concessionateur? Fuck it, who cares.)
Todd gave his biggest smile. “Please, boss, I need...
Sal Ricci: The Tight End Inside Me
Christmastime in Elamville, and confirmed bachelor Riley Covington’s having dinner at the Ricci household, where Meg Ricci confides in him that she’s noticed a change in her beloved Sal.
She stopped for a moment, then looked Riley in the eyes. “You’re Sal’s closest friend on the team. Have you seen anything different about him lately?” “Different...
Psychic...Powerless...53 other men's sacks.
Writing ultra-masculine books about football-playing counter-terrorists for a Christian audience takes a little imagination. Because so much locker room chatter is unfit for women and children’s delicate ears, an author must employ creative license and poetic feats of language. In this excerpt, Jason Elam shows us the delicate, Edith Whartonesque phrasing necessary to convey the scene when...
There's Always Room for LeMonjello
Anytime a mall bomb plot gets foiled, there’s some serious interrogatin’ to be done.
“Who did it, Abdel? Who took the Allah of your youth and turned him into a butcher? Who took the beauty of your childhood faith and smeared it with blood? Who convinced you to commit this atrocity? Give me a name, Abdel! I need a name!” Hicks was standing now, leaning across the table.
Of...
Goin' Hog Wild with Sal Ricci!
Athletes don’t say much of anything in interviews. Everyone knows this, and it isn’t a big deal - we understand that pro athletes belong to a subculture that prides itself on privacy, the sports media encourage athletes to be quoted in abstract platitudes, every locker room has the “What You See Here, What You Say Here” sign somewhere, etc. But every so often you get a...
Jim Hicks: An In No Way Erotic Life
Since “Monday Night Jihad” is doomed from birth to devolve into a by-the-numbers “Rainbow Six”-style counterterrorism black ops potboiler, Elam takes special pains to introduce our favorite fingernail-pullers and nipple-electrode-attachers early. So let’s meet “Monday Night Jihad’s” baddest ass and the big screw at the Homeland Security...
Character Development: Elam Style
One thing we should talk about is the terrible way Jason Elam introduces all his characters, of whom there are dozens and dozens - for a book with an eventual body count in the mid-four figures, he pulls off the complicated feat of introducing countless minor, quirky, wisecracking assholes and somehow keeping all of the relevant ones alive far longer than the plot demands.
Here’s the way...
A few notes about the opening of "Monday Night...
1. We meet Riley Covington, American hero, deep in the shit mid-Enduring Freedom. “He was two years out of the Air Force Academy, where he had been a three-time WAC/MWC Defensive Player of the Year and, as a senior, had won the Butkus Award as the nation’s top linebacker.” So it’s incredibly obvious about ten pages in that we’re actually talking about Pat Tillman,...
Only picked because it was free on the Kindle:...
Our inaugural shitty book, “Monday Night Jihad,” by Jason Elam and Steve Yohn, is roughly a cross between “Black Sunday” and the bathroom line at a Tom Tancredo rally. Featuring unconvincing justifications of state-sponsored torture juxtaposed with near-pornographic depictions of maimed bomb victims, heroic cocoa-wielding stadium vendors, more made-up football team names...
