Pages 1-31

Once one has reached a certain point as a graphomaniac it becomes difficult to approach a book—even a pleasing story—as anything other than a data mine. I am currently enjoying a self-published book by a young soldier who has been—like the rest of his kind—greeted with a parade of emasculatory yawns by the American Publishing Bitcharchy, and am finding it more informative and wide-ranging than expected. I will post the review in sections under the projects I am working on. As I am currently jock-deep in writing Your Trojan Whorse, a manual for young fighters who would be best served by avoiding entanglements with the frienemy gender, I cannot recommend Breakfast with the Dirt Cult enough for those readers. The prologue chapter to this book is a thing of rare honesty, minus the frivolous pal that is typically hung over the subject of dating. More importantly, Joe Takes a Holiday is about dating for a young man with a serious undertaking on his mind.

Samuel Finlay’s Breakfast with the Dirt Cult is a rich enough story that I’m reviewing it in stages. This is a novelized account of a well-read soldier’s life in the post 911 American Army. I break it into 4 sections, and will not be reviewing the final one so as not to give away the story. Breakfast with the Dirt Cult is not so much a yarn as a story of masked transformation.

At the end of his celebrated lecture, Transformations of Myths Through Time, Joseph Campbell was asked how the person who seeks enlightenment in a world ruled by a jealous spiritual darkness gets by. The old professor answered with a myth of The Mask, a concept that was well known to the ancient slave fabulist Aesop. The listeners were not, like the protagonist, young people in trouble. In Breakfast with the Dirt Cult, the protagonist, Specialist Tom Walton, embarks on his transformative journey while looking for a prostitute in a Montreal cabaret before deployment to Afghanistan.

What Tom finds surprises him, and sets into motion the already weary wheels of his soul as he looks inward and outward—and tries to see into another person—in his quest to place himself in a world that was more and more coming to seem like one he had not expected to wake up in. While speaking with an unexpectedly well read stripper Tom describes his concept of wearing the old professor’s mask as “play along and walk small.”

Unfortunately—or fortunately from this reader’s perspective—Samuel lost his chance to get this book published by a mainstream publishing house, despite its excellent execution, when he penned the following paragraph on page 2:

“Strippers were God’s Chosen People. There was an integrity about them and what they did, and all parties went knowing the rules of the game, and enjoying the bittersweet narcotic of mutual disposability. The negotiating of its price was all up front and out in the open, unlike the regular nightclubs and bars where bitches postured like beasts in heat on the Serengeti yet spouted the ’I’m just here to dance with my girlfriends/I’m not sure what I want right now’ lines they regurgitated from whatever piece of Clit-Lit they had just read.”

Sliding this by some Clit-Lit editor, who was herself a fading beast in heat on the Serengeti of Middle Age American dysgenic courtship would not be nearly as simple as sliding in the temporary solution to her bitterness.

From page 1 to 31 Tom Walton’s quest for simple human companionship becomes a story of a man soul-searching alongside a darling of a seductress, who might—or then again, might not—be trying to find the key to unlock herself as well.

There have been few offerings in literature that equal what is essentially the prologue to a Soldier’s war story for the honest meeting and unmasking of a young man in the company of a woman. I will not be touching on the possible reuniting of Tom and Amy in the latter stages of the story. But thus far, in his account of a soldier’s brief leave from a life of savage emptiness, Samuel Finlay crafts the first act in a story that feels like a candidate for a human signpost on the road to war, a From Here to Eternity for the generation of soldiers who the Gods of War grew bored with.

Sam's book is available via the link below.