Spare Parts

A sure satire hinged on a droll, mid-life love story, Spare Parts lampoons the media, military and politics and celebrates grass roots initiative in a post-9/11 world.

In the autumn of 2002, emotionally burned-out New Yorker Hunter Barnhill is resettling in Massachusetts’ bucolic Berkshire Hills when a massive, pre-dawn explosion rocks the hills, a helicopter thunders over his farmhouse, and bulldozers rip across his property. Highway construction hurls Hunter onto a harrowing and hilarious path that connects small town machinations with big time political manipulations and a new television game show that’s on the zeitgeist.

Town matriarch Emma Peters Pell, retired General Bunker T. Clappsaddle, TV personality Melanie Atwood, Dr. Ralph “Butcher” Barnes, Governor Brewster Pease, dance instructor Jean Glick, Constable Turbo Bull, mute school janitor Speedy Serika, Lt. Col. Marvin Norwocki, television producer Howard Lambert, town clerk Bertha Harper, and Massachusetts Senator Dick Donnelly are Barnhill’s supporting characters.

Genially written, Spare Parts weaves perfectly ordinary and outrageous events in a culture going haywire. When the surreal occurs, the shock is absorbed in the flow of the tale with the touch of magical realism.

R. E. Laurence cobbled words, mostly nonfiction, at Time Inc, Broadcasting Magazine and Young & Rubicam in New York City, crafted fiction, Spare Parts, in western Massachusetts, and currently writes mostly creative nonfiction in central Mexico.