John Mulligan is the author of Black Friday 13, a new satirical novel set in 2030, when a new pandemic spreads across an America ruled by an idiot president...
It is a work, he stresses, of total fiction.
John introduces Black Friday 13 below...
It's not easy, trying to make people laugh while being serious at the same time. My editor describes my work as satire, using humour to expose stupidity in politics. I thought I was just writing a serious funny book, but it’s nice to know there’s a label for what I do. It means I’m not the only one seeing the world through this particular lens, and that makes me feel better.
I don’t think the philosopher John Rawls was a satirist, or maybe he just didn’t think he was. In 1971 he published A Theory of Justice, a work whose core premise concerned what he called ‘the veil of ignorance.’ In essence, Rawls suggested that if you were creating the hypothetical perfect society, you should do it from behind such a veil, not knowing what your social status or personal attributes might be within the social order being created. So, for instance, because you were ignorant of what things like skin colour might represent in the future, you’d make sure that people of all colours were treated absolutely equally.
Nothing funny about old Rawls, that guy was a serious academic, but there’s still potential for humour in his philosophy. In the midst of lockdown I got to thinking about vaccines, and all the conspiracy theorists who saw them as the thin end of a wedge of control by some mythical power. What if, I wondered, their fears came to pass and a mass vaccination programme altered the human race beyond anything ever imagined? And what if the vaccine programme had been accelerated by adding it to the water supply?
I got to thinking about Rawls, and his theory. How about, I wondered, if the vaccine had a side effect of turning all white people black? How would white heads of government react to seeing a black face looking back at them from the bathroom mirror? Thusly Black Friday 13 was born, a book that satirises (according to my editor) the governments of the USA and Russia, and that identifies a threat to the very existence of the Klu Klux Klan. Into this mix I added an idiot in the White House and a tyrant in the Kremlin, but of course I then had to set it in 2030 because such a notion would have no credibility in the present day.
Black Friday 13 was launched, and started to sell. I was delighted to see it on the shelves in many shops, and available as a download on a well-known website. I hadn’t considered where that might lead, I just figured people downloaded books to read on the beach, on their holidays, stuff like that. I hadn’t reckoned on the nutters.
I looked at the message request warily; I didn’t recognise the name and you have to be careful. I clicked anyway, and the screen didn’t fill with popups. He just wanted to thank me.
‘You have good information,’ he said. ‘I always suspected they were putting it in the water, and now you’ve confirmed it.’
I responded with a series of question marks.
‘The book,’ he said, I know it’s not fiction, there’s too much detail. You obviously work for them.’
‘It’s a novel,’ I said. ‘None of it is true. It’s political satire.’
He wasn’t having any of it.
‘I know you have to say that,’ he said. ‘Do you know they’ve already blocked most of it online? It only goes up to chapter seven. I’m telling people about it before they delete it all.’
‘That’s because they just give the first seven chapters free on Amazon,’ I said, ‘you have to buy it to get the rest.’
‘The Deep State,’ he typed, ‘they want to control us all, with their scamdemic. And now the vaccine is in the water, we have to warn people not to drink it.’
‘And drink what, instead?’ I was getting tired of this nonsense.
‘Pretty much any soda.’
I couldn’t resist. ‘They’re made with water too.’
‘Then rainwater,’ he said. ‘We can capture our own rainwater.’
I was starting to enjoy this.
‘Chemtrails,’ I said. ‘The aeroplanes are always spraying. So it gets in the rainwater too.’
‘We need to dig wells,’ he said. ‘The vaccine will destroy us if it gets into our brains, they’ll control our minds. But you know all this, you work for them.’
‘No I don’t. I’m just a novelist. I write fiction.’
‘No need to explain, I understand you can’t talk about it. But we appreciate you letting us know.’
I figured I’d humoured him for long enough; I blocked him and deleted the messages.
I hope he bought the book, but he probably didn’t. Because then they’d have his details.
Black Friday 13 is published by Monument Media Press
