Synopsis

the Lost Project is a story about a young man who slowly slips into psychosis while he drives around in his car listening to the radio. the Lost Project approaches the problem of a sick person who is so sick and entrenched in their sick universe they cannot begin to fathom that their behavior and interior monologue are wildly outside of the realities of life. The message of my book is unique because it is not a sensationalized gimmick of overt insanity. It is a slow-burning soliloquy of a status quo that ferments into a euphoric delusion of paranoid, vainglorious, grandeur.

I am the one to write this book because I am the Prodigal Son of an Akron, Ohio rubber factory fortune and my older, only brother died in childhood and my Daddy was a drunk who didn’t love me.

Our story begins when Your Humble Narrator and his mother detour through the McDonald’s drive-thru on their way to Akron General Hospital for Your Humble Narrator’s sister’s impending delivery of her son and first-born child.

Your Humble Narrator mentions he had a hickey on his neck by the time he held his newborn nephew.

A short story Your Humble Narrator wrote about a young woman named Lucia who attends an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Barberton, Ohio on a Monday night. The name of the meeting is Barberton Monday Night. The title of the story is “Barberton Monday Night.”

Your Humble Narrator meets his former crush named Mara for coffee. He drops the bombshell on her that he was accepted into a Low-Residency Master’s of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing in Pittsburgh. He informs her he’ll be leaving to begin his studies in the New Year of 2016. An election year, interestingly enough.

Your Humble Narrator studies creative writing in Pittsburgh. As part of the curriculum, he visits the Andy Warhol Museum where he is quite taken by Warhol’s stenciled mass-produced facsimiles of cases of Heinz Pickle Relish.

One night Your Humble Narrator’s cell phone dings and lights up over and over again. Yet after inspection, he doesn’t seem to have any unread text messages or e-mails.

An Integrative Essay Your Humble Narrator wrote. A think-piece on expanding and collapsing binaries of high and low art, of fiction and non-fiction or some bullshit like that.

Your Humble Narrator’s parents leave Ohio to winter in Florida. Abandoning him to watch over the estate while he continues his studies and works in a local hotel owned by a family of far-right Christians.

Your Humble Narrator sees a staged reenactment of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” and the story and performance give him the heebie-jeebies.

A continuation of the short story “Barberton Monday Night” Lucia leaves the AA meeting. She smokes a cigarette while driving. She tosses the lit butt out the window and it accidentally blows up an oil tanker truck with a defective valve.

Your Humble Narrator senses the Adult Alternative music played on the radio is meant to mirror and infiltrate his moment-by-moment mental state. He begins to sense people are watching him. This paranoia is intensified by misleading and false memories that his personal belongings in his house have been moved. He begins to anticipate abstract messages that never come from people who don’t exist.

A final whiz-bang blowout. An anticlimactic yet cathartic steeplechase.

Your Humble Narrator drives around in his car listening to the radio as he slowly slips into psychosis. He believes he witnesses a car slide, fish-out, and flip in the middle of the highway in the middle of the night in the middle of a snowstorm.

The next afternoon his sister hauls his scrawny, quaking crazy ass into Akron General Hospital’s #600 Unit.

Mara comes to visit him in the hospital with his sister and everyone has a terrific time.

Sales arguments

• My previous eBook Treehouse Telephone is available on two internet platforms: free-ebooks.net and smashwords.com
• With minimal dare I say "slacker" grassroots effort and good ole' fashioned word-of-mouth Treehouse Telephone has racked up over 300 downloads.
• Far from a "sophomore slump," the Lost Project will prove to build off Treehouse Telephone's momentum of an established reader base.

Similar titles

• City of Glass, Paul Auster, Sun & Moon Press, 1985. Your Humble Narrator of the Lost Project believes he is solving a mystery. However, the drama and conflict of the investigation is not created by external events in the community but instead by a mirage of his sick mind's perceptions.
• Ghosts, Paul Auster, Sun & Moon Press, 1986. the Lost Project differs from Ghosts because Your Humble Narrator of the Lost Project is not spying ***SPOILER ALERT!*** on someone who is spying on him, but is instead spying on a spy who doesn't exist but Your Humble Narrator is utterly convinced does exist and is spying on him.
• The Locked Room, Paul Auster, Sun & Moon Press, 1987. the Lost Project is different from The Locked Room because instead of a mediocre and unsuccessful writer becoming obsessively infatuated with the life and manuscripts of his childhood friend. Your Humble Narrator of the Lost Project, a mediocre and unsuccessful writer too becomes obsessively infatuated with the life, alcoholism and eventual recovery from alcoholism of a fictional young woman Your Humble Narrator made up and is writing stories about.

Audience

The Audience for the Lost Project is readers who have suffered from mental illness; readers who know/love someone who has suffered from mental illness.

Advance praise

The three similar titles previously listed are now compiled and published as one book entitled The New York Trilogy. For readers out there who have cried "foul!" feeling I've cheated by listing three originally separate books that are now compiled into three separate segments of one book, worry not. I am fully prepared and mentally equipped to list three similar titles that are actually three separate books and have not been amalgamated into three separate sections of one book. I'd be more than happy to tell any curious readers how the Lost Project differs but is also like three other competing/complimentary books. My e-mail: chase.mcguire@gmail.com or my direct line: 330-907-8731 I'm available most evenings and weekends. If you have the time and feel so inclined. To dangle the carrot just a bit if you'll allow it. The three other similar titles to the Lost Project are as follows. Listed in the chronological order of when they appeared in my life:

If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino
More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction by Elizabeth Wurtzel
Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry.

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