The Fictionalizer

Enter the mad, mysterious, and unreliable world of the Fictionalizer!

Waldo Stanton, a high-technology executive, takes a frightening but revelatory journey from Manhattan to Los Angeles in the last two months of 1999. Waldo suffers from paranoid schizophrenic psychosis, and his condition has been worsened by his psychiatrist, who has his own strange agenda.

Following some life-changing and traumatizing incidents, Waldo heads west to confront the person he suspects is responsible: Richard Love, CEO of a shadowy, Los Angeles-based corporate empire that controls his company.

Light seeks to perfect a drug called "the Fictionalizer," which could purportedly modify reality itself. As Waldo travels cross country, he invades several of Light’s heavily guarded office buildings to uncover information about the development effort.

But as the narrative progresses, questions arise: How much of this journey is "fact," how much “fiction”? Who is who in the world of Waldo’s multiple personalities? Will Waldo find Light? Will the Fictionalizer work? If so, what does Light intend to do with it?

And what will happen then?

Praise for Love Song—Michael Schulze’s previous novel (available on Kindle):

“To read Love Song, a work twenty years in the creation, an audacious and uncompromising descent into the American fascination with violence and the contemporary pornography of horror, is to be abruptly within the terrifying/intriguing sphere of brutal novelty, something ‘deep, formless, and profoundly dangerous.’ It plays with genres—the horror story, the play-within-a-play, the psychosexual mystery-thriller—in streams of language that test the weight-bearing capacity of the printed page . . . .”

-from the Review of Contemporary Fiction, October 2003

“You'd need bionic nerves to take on this novel. Young bionic nerves. The book is drenched in sex and violence. And monsters. And paranoia. It made me feel titillated, repelled, baffled, and indicted all at the same time. Still, the narrative, at least at the beginning, barrels like a semi rolling downhill, and even at the end, when the text begins to break down into seemingly random words and letters, the momentum holds. How the author does that, I don't know. The observations are acute; the language has a sort of vibrating flatness, like an obscene joke being told with a face so straight you could roll a marble across it ….”

-Sue Cologgi

The Front Cover Designers

The cover image for The Fictionalizer was created by Scy Heidekamp of Seyhan Lee, a Boston-based creative and production agency that uses artificial intelligence to create startling and powerful images and motion pictures for brands, musicians, and other artists. The agency, which has won many prestigious design awards, was founded by Gary Lee Koepke, one of the top designers and creative directors in the world, and Pinar Seyhan Demirdag, a multidisciplinary artist and creative director, who is an early adopter of A.I. visual technologies. Her works have been shown at and acquired by several international museums.

Artist and musician Michael Thoresen, who assisted in the design of the cover for The Fictionalizer, has collaborated with the author on various creative projects over the years, including the novel Love Song, designing the cover and creating the graphic portion of the book. Schulze, Koepke, and Thoresen also co-wrote songs for their musical adventures with the rock bands The Parapsychics (Kalamazoo) and The Bricks (Boston). Thoresen lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan. You can view his paintings and drawings on Instagram. @michaeljthoresen.