Today, Bradlee Frazer joins us on the blog tour for his debut novel The Cure.  You can read my review of this captivating story, and enjoy a guest post from the author (below).

About The Cure by Bradlee Frazer

What if we had the cure for a catastrophic illness, but it lay hidden inside the blood and bones of just one man?

A mysterious new contagion is decimating the population. It starts in the lungs, like the flu, then moves to the bones, where it weakens and breaks them, eventually killing the host. The disease’s origin, methods of propagation and means of contraction are all unknown. There is no vaccine, and none is expected, as the virus is protean and elusive. If it remains unchecked and mutates into a more virulent form, it will become an extinction level event.

Jason Kramer has the disease, known by its nickname “Trips Lite” (the CDC doctor who discovered it is a fan of Stephen King’s “The Stand”), but his body produces a unique antibody that kills the viruses inside him. This component in Jason’s blood can be harvested and given to anyone who needs it—his blood can heal. But pharmaceutical magnate Phillip Porter needs to keep people believing that only his expensive drug cocktail will slow Trips Lite down, and so if there’s any chance someone with the disease will live, Phillip Porter must make sure that Jason Kramer does not.

Interweaving the styles of John Grisham and Michael Crichton, The Cure is a thriller that fuses genres while retaining its own unique voice to tell the story of Jason—burdened with the knowledge that he is mankind’s last hope—as he struggles against Porter’s avarice and greed in the face of an impending viral apocalypse.

ON THE ART OF WRITING LYRICALLY–BUT NOT WRITING LITERARY FICTION

Of my many writing influences (Stephen King, Caleb Carr, Michael Crichton), the one author I would most like to emulate in my fiction is Ray Bradbury. I began reading his short fiction as a boy, and it has inspired and moved me for all the intervening years.

Consider this excerpt from “Mars is Heaven,” first published in 1948: “The ship came down from space. It came from the stars and the black velocities, and the shining movements, and the silent gulfs of space.” Read critically and literally, the ship could not have come from the “black velocities,” as “velocities” is not a place.

Bradbury’s genius, among many, was his ability to use words in atypical ways to create vivid imagery, creating extremely efficient, lyrical prose. In reading that the ship is coming from the “black velocities,” one can see the ship coursing through lightless space at incredible speeds, only to slow as it approaches the Martian atmosphere to begin its descent. That mental picture is created with just two words.

I think of this as “lyrical” because of the powerful way music lyrics employ the same trick. In the song, “She Talks to Angels” by The Black Crowes, Chris Robinson sings, “She keeps a lock of hair in her pocket/She wears a cross around her neck/ Yes the hair is from a little boy/And the cross from someone she has not met/Not yet.”

The subtle genius of those last two words “Not yet” is hard to fully appreciate, but in just two words Robinson serves to speak a sermon on faith and forgiveness and piety that would not be well served by a longer discussion. Just two words, “Not yet,” convey volumes about the protagonist’s situation and foreshadow her destiny.

Again, in “Mars is Heaven,” Bradbury describes “a shrill of fifes,” using an adjective as a noun to paint a picture of the sound. We listen as he tells us that a brass band has “banged off around the corner,” and anyone that has seen a brass band knows that they bang and clank as they go. Unconventional word choices, playing with the words in ways that cause them to behave like colors in a palette and not as mere ink on paper, is the secret to lyrical writing.

I do not confuse this with “literary fiction,” however. I do not aspire or attempt to write literary fiction. My school is good old commercial genre fiction, as evidenced by my debut novel, The Cure. But I do aspire to write lyrically, like Ray Bradbury, to infuse life and vitality without being verbose. That is the challenge: to add vivid detail using only the bare minimum number of words, such as is accomplished in the lyrics to a song. This creates rich, compelling prose.

Author Bio

Bradlee Frazer is an author, speaker, blogger and Boise, Idaho native who loves the blues, Ray Bradbury short stories and his wife, daughter and dogs. He is also the lawyer who successfully registered the color blue as a trademark for the iconic artificial turf in Boise State University’s football stadium.

Bradlee’s nonfiction has been published in national legal treatises on matters of Internet and intellectual property law, and he is a frequent speaker on those topics. His works of fiction include the short story “Occam’s Razor,” which was published in an online literary journal, and he has co-authored two screenplays, Dangerous Imagination and Spirit of the Lake. He has written scripts for sketch comedy, radio productions and short films, and in college Bradlee was a film critic who wrote and hosted a weekly half-hour television program called Premiere!. The Cure is his first novel.

Author Links

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5831140.Bradlee_Frazer

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Bradlee-Frazer/e/B007SWVZ66

Barnes and Nobel: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-cure-bradlee-frazer/1112713504?ean=2940014249324

Itunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-cure/id512211453?mt=11

 Kobo: http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/The-Cure-A-Thriller/book-YrsxhWa6SkWv-0nkRiEMsg/page1.html?s=iNw2CLbTT0e08m7O3IBR7g&r=1

 Diversion Books Cure:http://www.diversionbooks.com/ebooks/cure-thriller

 Diversion Books Author Page:http://www.diversionbooks.com/authors/bradlee-frazer

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book for review from Jitterbug PR and from the author as part of a virtual book tour. I was not compensated nor was I required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am posting this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”