You Better Not Shout

You Better Not Shout In 2079 the United States of America has been gone more than 50 years. What has replaced it is a nation that has made memory a crime. And when mixed with dissent it becomes a felony serious enough to have any and all recollections surgically removed. This is to be the fate reserved for a tenured professor of philosophy for daring to write a paper exposing the influences of Plato on his government. That his improbable name is madison makes him doubly cursed, and launches a fate to be played out through the actions and reactions of his Judge, his Jury, and his Executioners.Judges are integral to their judicial system but prosecutors make the real decisions. All too eager to assure the harshest sentences legislated by anonymous plutocrats these contemporary inquisitors know no moral or ethical bounds. For the Judge about to preside over the madison case the absolute craziest day of his life commences with the news of his appointment, a selection appropriately made by a cartoon-like prosecutor whose ambition and cruelty is legend. Being informed he had been chosen sends the Judge into visits to a holographic Aristotle and Plato, his clerk’s raw exhibition of the worst of questionable judgments and finally, on his returning home, composing a dialog for the family’s two rescued dogs.Juries are convened to pronounce guilt or innocence but not ever to decide. For madison his peers retreat into deliberations that mock everything he represents. Dominated by men whose strongest beliefs reside in entrepreneurship and whose greatest preference is for discussions that are less than illuminating they are frustrated by another academic who teams with a new young sidekick prone to fabrication, and a practicing psychiatrist eventually asked to hand out a brain, a heart, courage, and a way home. And in their interim jurors manage to write a musical play killing the seven liberal arts, rewrite the story of Noah, and detail how privatizing the courts should be earning them a profit.Executioners are present but without capital punishment officially sanctioned penalties reach back into frightening colonial remedies. All are deployed without the possibility of mercy. And within the continuing parade of unexpected characters and props there are visions of Robinson Crusoe and his family Bible, Mozart’s don Giovanni’s song imploring yet more love, and generations of still moonshining tidewater hillbillies. You Better Not Shout offers readers a civics lesson on holding a repressive society together. One where unfriendly philosophers and friendlier popular and high culture characters are called upon to help explain the world. And whether clues are uncovered through reality, dreamscapes or nightmares the bizarre encounters that are chronicled can find enough humor and humility to include Satan playing the trombone, a musical celebration of Trotsky’s death with Stalin comfortably singing the lead, and even an endurance contest for staring at Plato’s worn deep discounted sandals. All just a part of the confusion for mirroring the nation they live in.

Richard Shatzman was born August 17, 1951 in St. Louis, MO. Following graduation from the University of Kansas School of Architecture and Urban Design he became a licensed architect in 1978. Still practicing architecture Richard and his family relocated from St. Louis to Metro-West Boston in 1996. For several years his work often brought him back from the east coast to the Midwest and the great American city of Chicago. The city’s wonders and enduring memories made it a natural choice for the setting of You Better Not Shout, a work begun in 2013 shortly after self publishing his first novel. Far from the Illinois prairie Richard and his family still reside in Massachusetts, and in one of his more fervent hopes he remains further yet from the society described in the unsettling future in this work.