Published: Dec. 22, 2012
Words: 110,755 (approximate)
Language: English
ISBN: 9781939198129

Short description

A comfortable, middle-aged, ATM switch software developer becomes obsessed with risk taking. This story is about the risks we take as individuals and as a species. It’s about addiction and obsession and how we play the money game as consumers and as corporations. It’s about how we love, abuse and protect one another. It’s about our will to survive and all the ways we strive not to.

Extended description

Specifically, “The Money Song” is about a comfortable, middle-aged, ATM switch software developer who becomes obsessed with risk taking. He risks his life by driving increasingly and insanely longer distances across a quaint country bridge with his eyes closed, his career and freedom by installing a bank card (identity theft) scheme on his employer’s Interac network, and his marriage by stealing from and then becoming involved with a local slots addict whose abusive spouse is a dirty OPP officer involved in strip club and grow-op shakedowns. At first the narrative is interspersed with short articles (journalistic asides) on high risk activities. Later these morph into dreams in which the MC’s loved ones—his wife, with whom he runs a family restaurant, the young Amish boy on rumspringa who’s become his professional protégé and who gets swallowed up by The World in ways he’d never anticipated, and his slot-addicted victim turned romantic interest—all read to him.

Mo.. (Read more) Specifically, “The Money Song” is about a comfortable, middle-aged, ATM switch software developer who becomes obsessed with risk taking. He risks his life by driving increasingly and insanely longer distances across a quaint country bridge with his eyes closed, his career and freedom by installing a bank card (identity theft) scheme on his employer’s Interac network, and his marriage by stealing from and then becoming involved with a local slots addict whose abusive spouse is a dirty OPP officer involved in strip club and grow-op shakedowns. At first the narrative is interspersed with short articles (journalistic asides) on high risk activities. Later these morph into dreams in which the MC’s loved ones—his wife, with whom he runs a family restaurant, the young Amish boy on rumspringa who’s become his professional protégé and who gets swallowed up by The World in ways he’d never anticipated, and his slot-addicted victim turned romantic interest—all read to him.

More generally, it’s about the risks we take as individuals and as a species. It’s about addiction and obsession and how we play the money game as consumers and as corporations. It’s about how we love, abuse and protect one another. It’s about our will to survive and all the ways we strive not to.
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Adult-content rating: This book contains content considered unsuitable for young readers 17 and under, and which may be offensive to some readers of all ages. For more information, see the Support FAQ.

Tags

drug abuse, child abuse, spousal abuse, prostitution, sex addiction, identity theft, gambling, marijuana, coma, blackjack, strip club, bull riding, casino gambling, stock market investing, mutual funds, strip clubs, lap dancing, love addiction, gambling addiction, hikikomori, snake handling, gambling addict, bank card theft, base jumping, buying a new car, casino whale, derivatives trading, dew worm picking, forced tender laws, gambling strategies, interac gateway, marijuana growops, permanent vegetative state, sled diving, the imperfect crime, thermonuclear war

Available ebook reading formats

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Reviews

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Review by: Lia Mitchell on Jan. 25, 2013 :
Having read and enjoyed some shorter works by this author, I decided to check out the sample of his novel and liked the first seventy pages well enough to read the rest. The narrative voice is witty, engaging, and (somewhat ironically, given the situation at the end) hyper-self-aware. First as a diversion from a banal and unsatisfactory everyday life, the inexorable attraction of risk draws the narrator gradually into a grittier drama of crime, gambling, and domestic abuse. The love story (perhaps a misnomer) of the narrator and Margaret is believably described as a misdirected impulse on both sides, towards danger and youth on the narrator’s part, for escape and safety on Margaret’s, although her life beyond her interaction with the narrator (apart from her victimization at the hands of her boyfriend) goes largely unexplored. Inserted short texts on other forms of risk-taking behavior in the first half of the book are often interesting, although sometimes I found myself looking for a closer connection between their contents and the subsequent chapter than was perhaps present or intended.

Overall I found The Money Song to be a swift and satisfying read, a reflection on both the pleasures and dangers of our attempts to escape the too-familiar everyday world, and the frustration of that everyday world that continuously impels us to seek alternatives.
(reviewed within a month of purchase)

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