Okay, here is a fun guy, witty and sharp. I had the pleasure of meeting Richard at the annual Florida Writer's Association banquet. We shared a few laughs and talked shop (writers do that, ya know). So, I tell Richard that I write fiction, mostly fantasy. He tells me he writes metafiction.
What? What is that?
Oh, it's fiction that is aware of itself. As the kids say these days, "Mind=Blown". I must be living a sheltered life, I've never heard of it before that night. It sounds fascinating and I want to try it. In the meantime, here is Richard telling about his novel and a little about himself.
MINDWARP, A Novella …And Other Strange Tales
A committee of
muses sits about the living room of my brain, discussing matters of no great
import. A motley group they are, having just finished their pizzas—one
pepperoni, one vegetarian, one combo—hold the anchovies.
“Why in the
world is he doing this?” asks the chair-muse, finger-flicking crumbs from her
robe….
Thus begins a journey
into the mind of a “deranged author” (it says so on the back cover!) and his collection
of short fiction, MindWarp, a Novella…And
Other Strange Tales. Kirkus Reviews, the self-described “World’s Toughest
Book Critics,” described the novella and accompanying eight short stories by
author Richard Hébert this way:
This
scintillating collection…uses offbeat character studies to wrestle with snaky
issues of identity and self-knowledge. Hébert’s loquacious, usually anonymous
narrators are obsessed with penetrating the riddle of the people around them.
In
“MindWarp,” a nameless writer battens for inspiration on Guy, a working-class
barfly who is almost elemental in his beaten-down ordinariness. Things get
complicated when Guy begins an affair with the feisty, appealing Yolanda; the
couple pushes back against the writer’s determination to “warp” their reality
into a fictional celebration of heroic failure—until the writer himself seems
to become the unstable, increasingly desperate creation of his own story.
Quirky,
opaque figures abound in other stories; “Ana, Always,” about a Yugoslavian
youth’s efforts to fathom the tragic mystery of a middle-aged woman, is a
meditation on family and exile; “Silence,” a somewhat affected tale about a
guilt-burdened war veteran who acquiesces in his wife’s affair with an
ex-comrade, finds power in the evanescent fracturing of its hero’s personality.
Only in “Azazel,” a comic gem about a mythical desert herdsman who tends the
world’s scapegoats until the powers that be decide he needs a ritzy California
estate in which to receive humanity’s atonement, do we meet a man who
thoroughly knows himself.
The
author delights in mind games; the title novella is as much a commentary on the
conundrums of fictional representation as it is a fiction. Fortunately,
Hébert’s writerly conceits are rescued by the quality of his prose; his deadpan
realism, mordant wit and acute powers of description ground his flights of
abstraction in the soil of experience.
A
beguiling blend of high-concept narrative and old-school literary chops.
Kirkus
subsequently named the collection to its top 50 list of 2011 “Indie” books.
__________
Hébert
is a former award winning investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize nominee; a media
relations manager and consultant; a nationally published magazine feature and documentary
film writer, and world traveler. Many of his works of fiction, including the
stories in MindWarp, were inspired by
incidents encountered during his travels in Europe, Africa and North, Central
and South America. He currently also writes a political blog – Richard’s Take – from his retirement home in St. Augustine,
Florida.
His other published books include a memoir, Life Is Good; a novel, The Questing Beast, and Highways to Nowhere: The Politics of Urban
Transportation. 
Mindwarp is available on Kindle: http://goo.gl/sr1zT
It is also available in paperback, BN Nook, and directly from the publisher, Author House.
Signed copies are available directly from the author: rlhebert0906@att.net
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