by Petronius Jablonski (Author)
Spy by night, blogger by day, Zelda Alpizar becomes infected by a contagion known to civilians as guilt, forcing her to choose between following orders or intervening to save two watchmen. Their trance-like lethargy makes them the ideal storage drives for a detonation code. Decrypting it could have lethal side-effects. Though the most important thing Zelda will ever find, the boundary between good and evil is of little value in a place where the only legend reads Here There Be Monsters. Security guards, harbingers of dawn, are they not warriors? Beneath the polyester Travis and Alex consist of flesh and blood. A predator stalks them, more implacable than skateboarders. Putting your tax dollars to work, the NSA discovers that human storage devices offer greater security than digital ones. Dead drives tell no tales. Like all their secrets it's soon available to the highest bidder. When Zelda infiltrates a secret society lending this service to terrorists, she sees how the private sector can be almost as wicked and incompetent as the government. They should have chosen a more secure password. "Mary Weatherworth" is also an adult actress beloved by security guards, and an urban legend reputed to appear in mirrors when summoned thrice. Busy lady. This ambiguity entwines discrepant parties in strange ways. Connected to them all by one degree of separation, the sausage link in a karmic chain, Maestoso the Dachshund waddles across this remorseless battlefield, observing the chaos, perhaps resolving it. Avoid eye contact. You don't want him inside your head. Set amid the entropy of the mortgage meltdown, Schrödinger's Dachshund prowls the shades of gray separating science from the paranormal, internet memes from philosophy, and unpleasant necessity from evil.
Author Biography
Preserving thoughts for the enjoyment and edification of strangers, renouncing the immediate joys of revelry and friendship and love for the unlikely esteem of men unknown, is this not madness incarnate, or is it the closest one can come to "rule over day and over night, and to divide the light from the darkness," and to see that it is good? Petronius Jablonski studied Philosophy, Psychology, Mathematics, Philology, Classics, and Physics at UW Parkside. Some Call It Trypophobia is a collection of published stories and an existential analysis of the phobia. Schrödinger's Dachshund is his first novel. Mount Silenus began as therapy for Post-Traumatic Mountaineering Disorder and never looked back. Jablonski writes extensively about music, though there is only one song he reviews. See his magnum opus and masterpiece, The Annals of Petronius Jablonski, for a thoroughgoing critique of Western Civilization [sic]. Included are the paradigm-shattering contributions of Petronius' Shovel, Petronius' Blender, Schadenfreude Before-the-Fact, Petronius' Garage, and Petronius' Wheelbarrow, each equal in momentousness to Occam's overrated Razor and Plato's much-ballyhooed Cave. He grew up in Cudahy, Wisconsin, where he began chronicling versions of the Mary Weatherworth meme. This urban legend about a blind, mirror-infesting apparition endures and mutates like some Campbellian myth. Bizarre and horrifying accounts uncoil across Schrodinger's Dachshund, winding toward their origin. Jablonski went undercover with the Sentinels of the Chandelier to study the mysterious connection between their Gnostic teachings and the Weatherworth meme. Lawsuits pend. Less abstract threats loom.