*Book Tour & Giveaway* If Nothing Else, Eve, We've Enjoyed the Fruit-GUEST POST

If Nothing Else, Eve, We've Enjoyed the Fruit

by Elaine Pascale

Genre: Horror

What happens when a kept woman refuses to take her ridatemp and begins thinking for herself? In If Nothing Else, Eve, We've Enjoyed the Fruit; she begins talking to bunches of grapes and cantaloupe that convince her to commit murder. Through her visitations with fruit, the woman learns that a gender war can be reversed by traveling back in time and eradicating the Tree of Knowledge and its villainous apples. The fruit persuade her by telling her four other stories:

Boys Will be Boys: A spa is turned into a concentration camp: just don't ride the elevators!

Ripped to Shreds: Pregnant Jody Burkhoff's body is changing rapidly, but not as quickly as the lupine metamorphosis of her husband. First the neighborhood animals are mutilated, then the neighbors are viciously murdered. Which proves to be more dangerous, a monstrous creature or a hormonal woman?

O: Khaki Barlow enters a pageant in which only one woman survives. She must complete tasks that are both mentally and physically daunting, all while trying to learn the meaning of the words left by the eliminated: I am here. Does she face incredible fears? Does a one-legged duck swim in a circle?

The Prison of a Man: Told as an ethnographical project, Lara Thomas researches the deaths of shoppers at a mall embedded in a small town, and encounters the legendary Goat Man.

If Nothing Else (Prologue): Readers learn the final decision in the gender war.

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Elaine Pascale has been writing for most of her life. She took a break from fiction in order to give birth to two children and complete a doctoral dissertation. She lives on Cape Cod, MA, with her husband, son and daughter. She teaches a variety of courses at a private university in Boston: from English Composition and Communications to a Vampire Seminar. Her writing has been published in Allegory Magazine, Dark Fire Magazine, and several anthologies. She is the author of If Nothing Else, Eve, We've Enjoyed the Fruit, and is also the author of the nonfiction book: Metamorphosis: Identity Outcomes in International Student Adaptation--A Grounded Theory Study. She enjoys a robust full moon, chocolate, and collecting cats.

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GUEST POST

 Sit Coms and Short Stories

I believe my propensity for the short story was born from my childhood love of sit coms. There was something reassuring about the fact that problems could be solved in a half hour—or less if you factor commercials—without the need for follow-up or re-visitations. The story arc is easily replicable regardless of genre, and even though we all tamper with it in our own ways, the basics of that arc can be found in most successful stories.

It is satisfying to be able to write and edit a short story. When revising, you can look at it as a whole: you can grasp the big picture. I easily grow bored with my writing, thus the short story (and flash fiction) works well with my attention span.

The story in If Nothing Else, Eve, We’ve Enjoyed the Fruit that varies the most from the sit com story arc template is “The Prison of a Man.” That story is modeled after the researcher part of my life. At the time, I had been working on an extensive Grounded Theory project and I was reflecting on how this style of research related to my love of storytelling, as the theory is basically born from the interwoven stories the participants tell the researcher. This then led me to think about truth and perspective. If we view situations from our personal perspectives, agendas, and experiences, does that mean that one person’s telling holds more truth than others? Or are all perspectives essentially true if they are told with as much honesty as our personal filters allow?

The Goat Man is a character that was whispered about when I was growing up. We knew where he lived, and there were various theories about his existence. Some of us felt sorry for him, others feared him, but we all saw him through our own lens. He appears differently in “The Prison of a Man” than the way I had come to know him as a child, and it was fun playing with the variety of ways that the characters viewed him.

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