One Star Read online

  Kurtis read the review aloud while pulling swigs straight off the bottle. By the end of the oral presentation he felt convinced MackdaddyFeeny06 had intentionally flamed him. Why else would someone react so vitriolic? He didn’t know this guy and why else would a person do such a thing except for spite? “Why would he download the book or waste time reviewing if he hated any book of this kind in the first place? Stupid troll.”

  The darkness responded as it always did—with silence. Working his eyes back and forth, the author tried to refocus them. Kurtis tried to click MackdaddyFeeny06’s profile; he succeeded on the second try and a list of reviews stretched the website vertically for pages and pages. Aside from the top review of Finnegan’s Wake, every rating was a single star.

  MackdaddyFeeny06 listed his location as Noneofyourbusiness, but he did list the state as the same as Kurtis’s. The troll’s photo was a selfie taken in front of a bookstore’s door, although he’d superimposed an image of the pirate’s face from the Spongebob Squarepants’ intro over his own. Kurtis didn’t recognize the store in the background, “ugh’s Book Sellers.”

  He bit his lip again and reopened the cut. He didn’t care, except that it stung like hell when he swished a mouthful of gut-rot over the wound.

  Kurtis felt the black tendrils of unconsciousness creep into the edges of his vision. Hoping that his mood might improve in the morning, he tried convincing himself that time would gloss over the wound and bury the bad review with countless others.

  Staggering to his large, empty bed—or what passed for the cot he’d pulled together in his living room, he let the blackness take him and he passed out. Although his equilibrium took a hit from the spins caused by the whiskey, his mind replayed a million scenarios where he had the chance to defend himself against the bad review, even if none of the commercial websites allowed for an author’s rebuttal.

  5

  “No, sir,” Tim explained through the telephone. “Indie authors don’t have much luck doing signings in our store, mainly because we never take consignments as part of our policy. I’d suggest you try one of the larger chains down the way.”

  He sounded as if he genuinely felt bad about it. Truthfully he did and tried to convince the owners to relax that policy—indie books seemed to hold some popularity especially among the hipster crowd and Tim was all about innovation, even if he agreed that the new publishing models being pushed by Amazon and others seemed to be killing the scene.

  Feeny turned his ear to the manager who explained his case and snorted with derision. “Any author worth his salt wouldn’t be making his own marketing and promotion calls, anyway,” he muttered as he straightened the stacks of books clumsy customers had messed up.

  “No, sir. It was my pleasure,” Tim said politely. “Perhaps you’ll give us a call when your next book comes out if it’s with a major, traditional publisher… yes… we’re the only Harbaugh’s Book Sellers… we’re connected to two other stores but they have different names and the same owner. Just the one location with this name, but the policy is the same at the other two locations.” He offered the other names and locations so that the caller didn’t waste his time or theirs.

  Feeny cocked his head. Sounds like this guy doesn’t know how to take a “no” for an answer.

  “Have a good day,” Tim said and then hung up.

  “Another crummy self-published author trying to make it big?” Feeny asked.

  “Everyone starts somewhere,” Tim stated placidly, trying not to sound argumentative but certainly willing to knock the haughty winds out of Feeny’s sail. “It’s not like even your great James Joyce crawled from the womb with a publishing contract.”

  “Well if he had, I’m sure it would read better than whatever that guy was hoping to pitch to our customers,” Feeny snorted.

  Tim rolled his eyes and scanned the store. Not a single soul walked within except those employed there.

  “I don’t know,” he spoke mainly to himself. Feeny was rubbish for conversation and that fact was pretty well known and established. “Something’s got to change with the industry. Maybe an indie model is good. Maybe not—but something’s got to give.”

  6

  As he stared at the storefront from a Google Maps’ street view, an odd familiarity niggled at Kurtis’s consciousness. He’d struggled to secure any berths for book signings and couldn’t seem to find any spots at regional or even local book festivals. They were all conveniently full or booked up to all artists except those with the backing of a publisher.

  He tried to pinpoint his feelings of vague recognition, but couldn’t seem to put a finger on it. Finally he gave up and opened his email to check his messages. There were several, more rejections and spam, mostly. A few came from sources he recognized from services and online sources he followed or had contacted previously.

  Kurtis spotted a recent email in his inbox from a pay-to-play ad service. He clicked the message.

  We’re sorry, but we only accept authors with a minimum rank of three stars or above, it read.

  Likewise read the text from the next message from a different online advertising service. The only services who wanted to take his money, it seemed, were from disreputable blog tours and ad hosts with very little following or distribution. The sort of books they pushed were poor quality and he didn’t want to become guilty by association with those places.

  A new message from Amazon popped up as a notification. The notice stated that they’d removed a positive review he’d left a day ago on his own behalf; he’d tried to rebuff the hateful, online diatribe left by MackdaddyFeeny06 but it didn’t work. It had been weeks since his first attempt had been pulled and every review he tried to flat-out purchase via sites like Fiverr were promptly killed by Amazon’s advanced algorithms.

  Kurtis spat a string of profanity upon the head of his internet nemesis. Amazon’s sophisticated bot scripts could pick out and murder anything he attempted to do on his own behalf but couldn’t seem to understand the underserved troll review by someone who admitted they hadn’t even read the book.

  Fuming with frustration and biting his lip, as had become his habit, Kurtis clicked his book’s listing to see if anything had changed. Nothing. His sales rank hadn’t moved and his rating remained mired at one star. Eleven other people clicked to indicate that the negative review had been helpful to influence a buying decision. Kurtis wanted to explode.

  He opened his Smashwords account which was less regulated and often more author-friendly. A copycat troll followed up on MackdaddyFeeny06 with another bad review, mostly just copy-and-pasted sections with follow-up “lols” as another hater found some inspiration for his own trash-talk attempts.

  Kurtis snapped. He snatched up his laptop. The author was poised to hurl it across the room when he stopped short. He caught sight of the tiny icon image for MackdaddyFeeny06. Resuming his composure he sat back down and clicked the profile to blow up the image.

  He knew zooming and enhancing low resolution images was just crap from television or Hollywood dramas. The image he blew up was heavily pixelated as he increased it in size, but the building in MackdaddyFeeny06’s background was unmistakable. He cycled through his recent tabs, pulled up the map from his bookstore search, and entered the street view.

  Kurtis recognized the storefront of Harbaugh’s Book Sellers. The critic had mentioned his occupation during his nasty review. “Book Reseller” he had claimed.

  For several long minutes Kurtis stared at the screen, stewing in his rage, imagining a thousand self-justified scenarios. Some were verbal, some were violent, and each left him satisfied while failing to consider any realistic repercussions. Kurtis was the repercussions.

  Deep down inside he felt something die as the last scrap of tenderness within his heart turned to stone. It was time MackdaddyFeeny06 learned that freedom of speech was not anonymous and did not come without consequences.

  7

  “Excuse me?” A wiry man with sunken,
tired eyes approached the clerk. His pupils darted to the nametag affixed to the retailer’s shirt as if logging it for future reference. “Can you help me with a book recommendation?”

  Feeny nearly fell off his stool and he jumped at the chance. He buzzed with excitement as he pulled out a copy of Finnegan’s Wake and hurried over to random customer. “Let me tell you about the only book a person ought to ever read,” the corpulent man bubbled with enthusiasm. He launched into a pretentious monologue meant to insult anyone’s reasons for reading anything else. Rather than discussing Joyce’s virtues, Feeny merely disparaged anything else.

  The haggard man held up a hand to stop him mid-sentence. “I’m actually looking for something a little lighter… not quite so heady—maybe a book dealing with urban legends or a story similar to that Supernatural television show? Anything in that vein. What can you recommend that would be similar?”

  Feeny chuffed a quick burst of laughter. “Another store,” he recommended haughtily.

  The stranger nodded. “That’s what I thought.” His eyes seemed to sink a degree deeper. “No second chance for you.” The customer turned on his heels before the clerk could backpedal on the insolent comment and try to make a sale at the expense of his pride.

  Working his mouth and trying to come up with some clever comment of reason to bring the customer back Feeny could only locate curse words in his vocabulary. A dire warning settled in the pit of his gut and he hoped that Tim hadn’t set him up with this guy.

  Tim had given him several recent warnings about his sharp tongue and he wouldn’t put it past the wily manager to entrap the senior employee. Feeny just knew Tim was looking for a good reason to fire him, but probably couldn’t since he’d been with the store for so long—since they first opened ten years ago. Firing him would be a tough sell to Tim’s uncle unless he’d done something truly awful… like insulted customers.

  Sweating nervously, Feeny slumped back into his seat and pledged to change his ways—even if only for self-preservation. The store was mostly quiet. He wrote another ignominious review of some indie book written by an aspiring seventeen year old author and burned her to the ground for describing the weather in her opening paragraph; it hadn’t taken long for him to lapse back into his old self and his apprehension defaulted back to indignation.

  An hour later Feeny had forgotten entirely about the wiry man. Tim relieved him at the till so that he could take a lunch break. It was just business as usual.

  He never noticed the cargo van at the edge of the parking lot or the eyes watching him through the binoculars. Feeny ambled across the strip mall’s asphalt lot and went to the same walk-up burger joint he frequented on most afternoons. He picked up a sack of greasy sliders, sat on the curb, and pounded them all down, never realizing he was being stalked like an animal.

  8

  Kurtis Ward felt a momentary twinge of guilt as he watched the thick, ponytailed man through his windshield. He’d followed Feeny home again; this hadn’t been the first time. He’d stalked the man for nearly a week now, recorded his habits and patterns in the composition notepad that he used to record story hooks and notes in.

  Kurtis didn’t feel guilty about the spying or any fate that might befall the chunky book vendor—Feeny deserved whatever fate the universe could dish out to him and Kurtis wouldn’t mourn if he even died. It wasn’t remorse for any crime that he felt, but rather the feeling that he could be using his time more wisely—start his next book and attempt to make a real living at what he loved. He had the money from Felicia’s life insurance.

  The author shook off the convicting feelings and lifted his binoculars again and recognized the screen of a new and popular dating app Feeny had logged into. This was about books to him—it was about justice.

  He logged onto his mobile connection on his laptop and opened a new browser. As Kurtis slipped further and further into obsession he’d found a website titled MackdaddyFeeny06mustdie.com; it was his new browser homepage.

  The site was an older Wordpress blog site written by some other wounded soul on the west coast and left to languish in the dregs of the internet. It hadn’t been updated in two years but the author shared a similar tale, though in the critics earlier days of trolling authors.

  Kurtis tried to look up the author—maybe they could provide support and encouragement for each other. It took some doing and a little cash, but he did find her info. Julie Baird killed herself six months ago.

  He clicked past Baird’s webpage and loaded up the dating website. Kurtis sighed, fumbling for his credit card, and then realized that they only charged men a fee to have an account.

  “Typical,” he muttered.

  He bit his lip and grimaced as he completed the fake profile on his laptop. The guilt returned—this time he deserved it and felt the depth of his violation. Making up a fake person didn’t bother him… using Felecia’s photos triggered something fundamental within him, though. Kurtis paused and nearly shut down his whole operation.

  He shook his head when the pendulum of his mind swung back. He’s got to pay for what he’s done. This jerk is ruining lives—and not just mine! He clicked the button and uploaded photographs of varying degrees of intimacy while he updated his fake persona’s details. Kurtis kept the innuendo very heavy handed except for under personal interests where he wrote, Finnegan’s Wake.

  The sun had been down for some time already; the low light made it easier to watch his target through the windows of the split ranch house that belonged to his quarry’s mother. Kurtis had been brazen enough to knock on the door and introduce himself to her. He discovered that she was partly hearing impaired—a fact that only encouraged Kurtis to further spying.

  Typical loser. He lives in his mother’s basement.

  Just like the last couple nights, she turned out her lights promptly at nine-thirty and Mark Feeny went to his computer station. Bathed in the glow of his monitor screen Kurtis watched the chunky male through his window, aided by high powered binoculars.

  The street was quiet and the nearby community consisted of mostly retired singles and an aging generation. By ten in the evening every house light would most likely be switched off. That fact made his plan feasible.

  Logging back into the dating website, Kurtis faked his location as nearby and instigated his revenge—setting his status as single and ready for action. It wasn’t very long before he had a solid hit; his catfish took the bait.

  9

  Feeny zipped his pants in a hurry, careful not to catch his skin between the teeth. This girl he’d just met seemed like she was good to go and she looked smoking hot! Apparently she just moved to the area and was “in the mood for some fun but didn’t know anyone local yet.” She also claimed to be “into smart guys, regardless of height or shape.” He assumed that must’ve been true. She seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of James Joyce, although Feeny continually tried to steer the conversation down more playful routes.

  Joyce had a place and time. Feeny liked to think it would be in the morning and over her coffeemaker.

  It seemed like Christmas came half a year early for him. Even though he kept assuming the mysterious woman would try and send him to some kind of scam website that required his credit card, she never did. She must’ve been real—even if he’d never actually met someone through an app or website before.

  He checked his clock before applying a quick mist of Axe body spray. Mother should be asleep by now, he grinned. Her timing seemed miraculous, and the address the online woman gave him checked out according to Google—it was an apartment complex just a few miles down the road.

  Feeny quietly slipped out the kitchen door and into the driveway where he parked. It connected to the quiet street beyond. So fixated on getting to his car door, Mark Feeny barely noticed the cargo van on the street which half-blocked his driveway. Its hood was up and a man stood by the bumper fidgeting with something in the dark.

  “Hey buddy, can you give me a hand?
” the stranger called out in the dark. “Everything just went dead and I coasted to a stop.”

  “Sorry. I’m busy—now get that piece of junk out of the way. I’m in a huge hurry!”

  “I can’t get it started and I don’t know anything about cars. Maybe you could help? I’m hoping you’ll see something obvious that I’ve overlooking.”

  Feeny muttered some choice curses beneath his breath and hastened towards the vehicle while chuckling about how he and his friends used to jokingly refer to the vehicle type as “creeper vans.” He paid little attention to the driver of the derelict and the driver walked over to meet his would be helper.

  Nothing struck Feeny as odd until he’d gotten two steps away from the driver. He caught a manic look in the man’s eye—a familiar set of eyes—sunken with fatigue and bitterness.

  Whirling around too late, Feeny tried to flee, cursing himself for never using that gym membership a pretty girl talked him into buying two years ago! A sharp jab in his back caught him and the familiar sizzle-crackle sound of a taser barely registered in his ears.

  His whole body cramped and seized like one giant Charlie horse and he fell to the ground as he convulsed. The attacker kept his finger on the button and poured volt after volt into him, wracking him with unimaginable pain. His bladder stiffened and then failed. Suddenly, his mind tripped a breaker and everything went black for a few long seconds.

  Feeny blinked rapidly as his mind came back on a few seconds later. A surge of energy invigorated him like a runner’s high as control reverted back to his suddenly clear mind.