As Hawaiian thriller author Cheryl Swanson knows, stories often get more interesting when death enters the picture. Amazingly, her own experience has taught her that is sometimes as true in real life as in fiction.
Four years ago Cheryl Swanson was diagnosed with invasive breast cancer. “Make a will,” her surgeon urged, when asked for a prognosis. Instead, Swanson transferred her feelings of being out-of -control into her debut novel, a thriller in which a strong, likeable female protagonist has to deal with her troubled teenage brother getting involved in a violent Internet game that leads to murder.
“Being in a chemo room is like being in the anteroom of a gas chamber,” Swanson said. “My challenge was to put that thoroughly awful thrill into words. And then, final step, create a much more entertaining situation than my own, in which those feelings might have happened in the first place.”
In Death Game, Swanson sends her female protagonist, Cooper O’Brien, on a nonstop roller coaster ride through the mean streets of San Francisco. Terror nips at Cooper’s heels all through the book, just as it did at Swanson’s during her cancer treatment. “What Cooper goes through is a reflection of what you experience as a cancer patient,” Swanson said. Cooper’s family, her life, her mental balance, her self-respect—they are under attack. “Just like those of all individuals fighting an extremely critical disease,” Swanson claims.
Death Game is chilling, but also often hilarious. Peopled with renegade teenagers wearing “Enema of the State,” and “I Love my Weenie,” t-shirts, a man who conceals microphones in his Iron Maiden bra, and a nonchalant beauty who seduces almost everyone she meets in Absinthe, a swank San Francisco restaurant, this is the wonderfully wacky landscape of life, San Francisco-style. In Death Game, San Francisco is a city where everything that is not for sale is up for grabs.
As Cooper searches for her vanished kid-brother, she is plunged into a wind tunnel of violence and dread. But she turns her terror and depression into a joke. “This is exactly what you see in cancer treatment rooms,” Swanson said. “You laugh because it’s laugh or commit suicide. You quickly learn not to take anything seriously. “
Cheryl Swanson cites that old Kathleen Turner movie, Romancing the Stone, as one of her inspirations for staying with her novel. “Remember how this crazy romance novelist forgets everything while she was writing? Cancer treatment made me feel just like that. Half the time, while I was writing about my heroine getting beat up, poisoned and terrorized, it was me I was writing about. I would go home from chemotherapy and find myself in the perfect mood to write the next horrifying scene in my novel. And then I would lighten up and start laughing. It’s how you handle something like this—it’s what gets you through.”
Swanson pointed out that being diagnosed with a serious disease often causes people to get down—finally—to doing what they’ve always wanted to do. “A serious disease teaches you your own mortality, your own humanity, your own limits. Once you’ve stop deluding yourself about your invincibility, you realize the time is now. Or never. Not next month, not next year. Today.”
Swanson pointed out that women often struggle with wasting their time on non-essentials. “Women are expected to be caretakers, nurturers, housekeepers, nannys, pet-sitters, and walking credit-cards for their teenagers,” she said. “We’re all at the point of self-annihilation. As Erma Bombeck once said: “’Just doing the housework will kill you, if you do it right.’”
“As women, we have a right to pursue our own dreams—but too often we let them slide. At some point, we’ve got to stop accomplishing what others want us to do.”
The reviews of Death Game indicate that Swanson has accomplished something worthwhile with her debut novel. According to December, 2006, Midwest Reviews: “The author, Cheryl Swanson, has penned a stunning debut novel with all the hallmarks of a great thriller.” According to Jeffrey Marks, consulting editor with Mystery Scene magazine and Edgar-nominee, “Pacing, characterization, intrigue, Death Game has it all. It keep me on the edge of my chair from the very first chapter. I couldn’t put it down and read it well into the night.”
Epinions review (December, 2006) said: “If you’re looking for a thoughtful, well-crafted thriller that will keep you guessing till the last clue’s in place, with a strong-willed protagonist who’s so real you finish the book thinking that she must exist somewhere on Earth, then give yourself a break and read Death Game at the earliest opportunity.”
Monday, April 23, 2007
Monday, April 16, 2007
Terrorism Subject of Thriller Death Game
Death Game Focuses on Unusual Terrorist Attack
With homeland security a national priority, most government officials would prefer that we wipe the imagery of high-level targets going down in a fireball from our minds. But when sailing under the Golden Gate Bridge in 2002, Cheryl Swanson, an expert on three-dimensional computer technology, found herself thinking, ‘What if…’”
Such was the genesis of Death Game, a suspense/thriller recently published by Zumaya Publications, LLC. “Doing the research was a challenge,” Swanson said, “because officials at the Golden Gate Bridge District, like those at other high-profile facilities around the country, are loathe to share information. They simply won’t give you any specifics.”
The tight-lipped silence is probably because the bridge has been considered a terrorism target for many years. In 2002, Spanish officials found videos among the possessions of suspected terrorists that included detailed images of the span, and, in 2003, the state attorney general named the Golden Gate Bridge the fourth most likely target in California, after LAX and the ports of Long Beach and Oakland.
Since the bridge contains over 80,000 tons of steel and weighs nearly 900,000 tons overall, realistic scenarios of its destruction aren’t obvious. But Swanson found that speculation about possible methodology was rife on the Internet. “Most of the attention focuses on someone bringing in a car-bomb to blow a hole in the deck,” Swanson said. “But the Golden Gate isn’t that vulnerable to those kind of attacks. Compared to the Loma Prieta, the typical car bomb attack is equivalent to a mosquito bite.”
An airline attack on the bridge is also occasionally postulated. “The destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001 made it clear that massive concrete and steel structures can be brought down from the air,” Swanson said. But her thriller pegs the true danger somewhere else; Death Game is based on an attack on the piers by marine tankers. “I came up with the idea mostly based on an awareness of how easy it is to sail into harbors on the California coast unchallenged,” she said. “But most authorities seem to consider marine tankers one of the more realistic threats.”
Swanson said that over the years she was only boarded once on the California coast—by immigration officials, when she strayed into Mexican waters. “My experience is that anyone can sail up and down the coast, enter whatever harbor they wish, and no one even notices.”
Swanson is the author of three non-fiction books and an expert in esoteric video technologies, including those used to train surgeons, as well as robotic systems for guiding emergency surgery in remote locations. “The U.S. Army, medical schools, Hollywood animators, and teenage boys are all fascinated by computer games,” she said. “I already knew a lot about the technology, from a realm where it was used in a helpful way. But you can’t work with advanced technology without realizing that this millennium has become increasingly dangerous because the things with which we are surrounded with are more dangerous.”
Swanson never intended to write a suspense/thriller, when she chucked her career in medical technology and started writing a novel. “I was in the middle of chemotherapy for breast cancer,” she said, “I was also in the final stages of an adoption from Guatemala, which my surgeon told me to stop pursuing because of my cancer diagnosis. That put me in a black mood. And then, like all of America, I was transfixed by 9/11. After 9/11, the spectrum of credibility expanded for everyone in America with a thinking brain. What was inconceivable was now possible--the utterly awful had become chillingly real.”
Swanson neatly transferred her feelings of being out of control into the heart of her heroine’s. Cooper O’Brien is on a nonstop roller coaster in Death Game, trying to prove her kid-brother is not a killer. “Being in a chemo room is like being in the anteroom of a gas chamber,” Swanson said. “My challenge was to put that thoroughly awful thrill into words. And then, final step, create a much more entertaining situation than my own, in which those feelings might have happened in the first place.”
Swanson said that she believes we are under-estimating the sophistication of terrorists, and mistaken in calling their acts irrational. “There’s a popular misconception that terrorists are lunatics who want to kill everyone in the West. It’s comic book image—Batman fighting the Joker. What we are actually seeing, instead, is much more complicated. These are highly sophisticated individuals, fully versed in media imagery. They know that we in the West think in images. On the West Coast, nothing is a more powerful image than a beloved landmark like the Golden Gate Bridge.”
Swanson found through her research that an amazing number of the Arab and Muslim terrorists have secondary and even primary identities as Westerners. “A standard part of growing up in bin Laden’s family, for example, involved attending university in the West. Osama studied in Jiddah, but he was a playboy in Westernized Beirut before he repented and returned to fundamentalist Islam. In many ways, that is the driving force of aggression against the West. They see it as a betrayal of his Muslim identity and pride.
“Terrorists intend to kill a certain number of people, yes, but their real goal is to exploit the news media to terrify a far larger portion of the public, she added. “The brilliance of bin Laden’s plan was that he spoke to us in a language of images we understood. Watching 9/11 on television, people felt like it wasn’t real. It seemed like something made up—a scene out of a movie. And that was the point. It was supposed to be like something out of a movie. The imagery kept it front and center on the world’s news’ channels for a long time. Bin Laden counted on that to help him attract a fresh army of recruits to jihad.”
Swanson said she felt there was a strong connection between the reduction of individuals to abstractions and terrorism. “In 1967, the political scientist Ole R. Holsti published an essay titled “Cognitive Dynamics and Images of the Enemy,” in which he argued that, while terrorists exploit media images, they are also psychologically disposed to reduce their human enemies into a single abstract image. Holsti went on to say that these abstractions cause terrorists to resort to violence, because the very abstractness and unreality of those images means they are bound to inspire immoral action.”
“It is a closed loop,” she said. ‘Terrorist groups manufacture oversimplified and repulsive images of the enemy, and then those images prompt attacks that are themselves highly repulsive.” Is it also possible that Swanson’s novel—with its imagery of a terrorist attack-- might inspire some immoral action?
She believes that it’s more likely the images created by books like hers are a deterrent. “One valuable benefit of fiction is that it alerts us to what’s possible,” she said. “With the publication of anything that contains a possible scenario for terrorists, that idea is no longer a usable terrorist plan. Once a plan is public knowledge, they’ve lost the element of surprise. They are forced to go on to Plan B, or Plan C.”
(Considered officially to be in cancer remission, after four years of being cancer free, Cheryl Swanson now lives with her Guatemala-born daughter, and her husband, Bob, two densely jungled miles from Michael Crichton in Kauai. Death Game can be purchased from Amazon.com and through local bookstores.)
With homeland security a national priority, most government officials would prefer that we wipe the imagery of high-level targets going down in a fireball from our minds. But when sailing under the Golden Gate Bridge in 2002, Cheryl Swanson, an expert on three-dimensional computer technology, found herself thinking, ‘What if…’”
Such was the genesis of Death Game, a suspense/thriller recently published by Zumaya Publications, LLC. “Doing the research was a challenge,” Swanson said, “because officials at the Golden Gate Bridge District, like those at other high-profile facilities around the country, are loathe to share information. They simply won’t give you any specifics.”
The tight-lipped silence is probably because the bridge has been considered a terrorism target for many years. In 2002, Spanish officials found videos among the possessions of suspected terrorists that included detailed images of the span, and, in 2003, the state attorney general named the Golden Gate Bridge the fourth most likely target in California, after LAX and the ports of Long Beach and Oakland.
Since the bridge contains over 80,000 tons of steel and weighs nearly 900,000 tons overall, realistic scenarios of its destruction aren’t obvious. But Swanson found that speculation about possible methodology was rife on the Internet. “Most of the attention focuses on someone bringing in a car-bomb to blow a hole in the deck,” Swanson said. “But the Golden Gate isn’t that vulnerable to those kind of attacks. Compared to the Loma Prieta, the typical car bomb attack is equivalent to a mosquito bite.”
An airline attack on the bridge is also occasionally postulated. “The destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001 made it clear that massive concrete and steel structures can be brought down from the air,” Swanson said. But her thriller pegs the true danger somewhere else; Death Game is based on an attack on the piers by marine tankers. “I came up with the idea mostly based on an awareness of how easy it is to sail into harbors on the California coast unchallenged,” she said. “But most authorities seem to consider marine tankers one of the more realistic threats.”
Swanson said that over the years she was only boarded once on the California coast—by immigration officials, when she strayed into Mexican waters. “My experience is that anyone can sail up and down the coast, enter whatever harbor they wish, and no one even notices.”
Swanson is the author of three non-fiction books and an expert in esoteric video technologies, including those used to train surgeons, as well as robotic systems for guiding emergency surgery in remote locations. “The U.S. Army, medical schools, Hollywood animators, and teenage boys are all fascinated by computer games,” she said. “I already knew a lot about the technology, from a realm where it was used in a helpful way. But you can’t work with advanced technology without realizing that this millennium has become increasingly dangerous because the things with which we are surrounded with are more dangerous.”
Swanson never intended to write a suspense/thriller, when she chucked her career in medical technology and started writing a novel. “I was in the middle of chemotherapy for breast cancer,” she said, “I was also in the final stages of an adoption from Guatemala, which my surgeon told me to stop pursuing because of my cancer diagnosis. That put me in a black mood. And then, like all of America, I was transfixed by 9/11. After 9/11, the spectrum of credibility expanded for everyone in America with a thinking brain. What was inconceivable was now possible--the utterly awful had become chillingly real.”
Swanson neatly transferred her feelings of being out of control into the heart of her heroine’s. Cooper O’Brien is on a nonstop roller coaster in Death Game, trying to prove her kid-brother is not a killer. “Being in a chemo room is like being in the anteroom of a gas chamber,” Swanson said. “My challenge was to put that thoroughly awful thrill into words. And then, final step, create a much more entertaining situation than my own, in which those feelings might have happened in the first place.”
Swanson said that she believes we are under-estimating the sophistication of terrorists, and mistaken in calling their acts irrational. “There’s a popular misconception that terrorists are lunatics who want to kill everyone in the West. It’s comic book image—Batman fighting the Joker. What we are actually seeing, instead, is much more complicated. These are highly sophisticated individuals, fully versed in media imagery. They know that we in the West think in images. On the West Coast, nothing is a more powerful image than a beloved landmark like the Golden Gate Bridge.”
Swanson found through her research that an amazing number of the Arab and Muslim terrorists have secondary and even primary identities as Westerners. “A standard part of growing up in bin Laden’s family, for example, involved attending university in the West. Osama studied in Jiddah, but he was a playboy in Westernized Beirut before he repented and returned to fundamentalist Islam. In many ways, that is the driving force of aggression against the West. They see it as a betrayal of his Muslim identity and pride.
“Terrorists intend to kill a certain number of people, yes, but their real goal is to exploit the news media to terrify a far larger portion of the public, she added. “The brilliance of bin Laden’s plan was that he spoke to us in a language of images we understood. Watching 9/11 on television, people felt like it wasn’t real. It seemed like something made up—a scene out of a movie. And that was the point. It was supposed to be like something out of a movie. The imagery kept it front and center on the world’s news’ channels for a long time. Bin Laden counted on that to help him attract a fresh army of recruits to jihad.”
Swanson said she felt there was a strong connection between the reduction of individuals to abstractions and terrorism. “In 1967, the political scientist Ole R. Holsti published an essay titled “Cognitive Dynamics and Images of the Enemy,” in which he argued that, while terrorists exploit media images, they are also psychologically disposed to reduce their human enemies into a single abstract image. Holsti went on to say that these abstractions cause terrorists to resort to violence, because the very abstractness and unreality of those images means they are bound to inspire immoral action.”
“It is a closed loop,” she said. ‘Terrorist groups manufacture oversimplified and repulsive images of the enemy, and then those images prompt attacks that are themselves highly repulsive.” Is it also possible that Swanson’s novel—with its imagery of a terrorist attack-- might inspire some immoral action?
She believes that it’s more likely the images created by books like hers are a deterrent. “One valuable benefit of fiction is that it alerts us to what’s possible,” she said. “With the publication of anything that contains a possible scenario for terrorists, that idea is no longer a usable terrorist plan. Once a plan is public knowledge, they’ve lost the element of surprise. They are forced to go on to Plan B, or Plan C.”
(Considered officially to be in cancer remission, after four years of being cancer free, Cheryl Swanson now lives with her Guatemala-born daughter, and her husband, Bob, two densely jungled miles from Michael Crichton in Kauai. Death Game can be purchased from Amazon.com and through local bookstores.)
Friday, April 13, 2007
Books I'm Reading
I occasionally get asked for the name of books that I am currently reading and enjoying. Below I’ve listed a recent favorite.
Coping With Weapons and Violence In Schools and On Your Streets, by Maryann Miller
The book was a New York Library Best Book For Teens. Timely, relevant and a great eye-opener.
I finished it a month or so ago, but I still recall fondly the fun of reading Legends of the Serai. J. C. Hall is the author and she is as skilled a wordsmith as they come.
Legends of the Serai stole hours of sleep from me. At the heart of this fantasy is a haunting exploration of the transfiguring power of love--a subject that, for all of its universal nature, requires a delicate touch to make bloom. J.C. Hall has that touch! She has another fantasy trilogy coming out soon, the first book will be Lady of the Lake.
Posted by Cheryl Swanson, Death Game
Coping With Weapons and Violence In Schools and On Your Streets, by Maryann Miller
The book was a New York Library Best Book For Teens. Timely, relevant and a great eye-opener.
I finished it a month or so ago, but I still recall fondly the fun of reading Legends of the Serai. J. C. Hall is the author and she is as skilled a wordsmith as they come.
Legends of the Serai stole hours of sleep from me. At the heart of this fantasy is a haunting exploration of the transfiguring power of love--a subject that, for all of its universal nature, requires a delicate touch to make bloom. J.C. Hall has that touch! She has another fantasy trilogy coming out soon, the first book will be Lady of the Lake.
Posted by Cheryl Swanson, Death Game
Friday, April 06, 2007
Cheryl Swanson Featured at Green Apple BookStore
RICHMOND REVIEW STORY
Death Game, by debut novelist Cheryl Swanson, was recently released and is being featured at Green Apple Book Store this month. Death Game was published by Zumaya Publications and introduces a hard-boiled, Irish Catholic female sleuth who lives in the Richmond District.
Cooper O’Brien spends her evenings prowling the area’s pubs and walking streets humming with Russian and Cantonese speakers. Her father is a counter-espionage agent and Cooper is pulled into her father’s shadowy world when her troubled teenage brother is targeted in a terrorist plot.
The waves of immigrants, not to mention a plethora of establishments serving food from every corner of the world, made the Richmond and Sunset an appealing setting for the novel, according to Cheryl Swanson. Not to mention the notorious fog, booming foghorns and marine breezes. Swanson said she found the area fascinating and exhilarating when she worked in it for several years.
Cheryl Swanson now lives in Kauai, but she visits often. “When I come, I take my five-year-old daughter to the Camera Obscura and hiking in Lincoln Park,” she said. Along the portion of the Coastal Trail that runs about six miles along the bluff above the sea she did research for her plot, sitting and watching traffic come under the bridge.
According to ForeWord Magazine, the leading reviewer of academic and independent press books, “Death Game is a sharp, fast-paced mystery.” ForeWord reviewer Maryann Miller said: “In this debut novel, the author weaves an intricate story with fine characterization and plenty of surprises. The pace is relentless and the language vivid.”
Many writers frequent the Richmond District, including best-selling author Amy Tam. Even though she uses Chinatown as the setting in her five novels, including The Joy Luck Club, she said in an article in the Charlotte Observer on January 28, 2007, “There's a cooler, lesser-known part of town where the newest immigrants from China, Vietnam and Russia have settled.” You guessed it. In the Richmond District, particularly around Clement Street.
Death Game
Cheryl Swanson
306 pages
Zumaya Publications
Softcover $14.99
978-1-55410-325-6
PDF and HTML $6.99
978-1-55410-326-3
Death Game, by debut novelist Cheryl Swanson, was recently released and is being featured at Green Apple Book Store this month. Death Game was published by Zumaya Publications and introduces a hard-boiled, Irish Catholic female sleuth who lives in the Richmond District.
Cooper O’Brien spends her evenings prowling the area’s pubs and walking streets humming with Russian and Cantonese speakers. Her father is a counter-espionage agent and Cooper is pulled into her father’s shadowy world when her troubled teenage brother is targeted in a terrorist plot.
The waves of immigrants, not to mention a plethora of establishments serving food from every corner of the world, made the Richmond and Sunset an appealing setting for the novel, according to Cheryl Swanson. Not to mention the notorious fog, booming foghorns and marine breezes. Swanson said she found the area fascinating and exhilarating when she worked in it for several years.
Cheryl Swanson now lives in Kauai, but she visits often. “When I come, I take my five-year-old daughter to the Camera Obscura and hiking in Lincoln Park,” she said. Along the portion of the Coastal Trail that runs about six miles along the bluff above the sea she did research for her plot, sitting and watching traffic come under the bridge.
According to ForeWord Magazine, the leading reviewer of academic and independent press books, “Death Game is a sharp, fast-paced mystery.” ForeWord reviewer Maryann Miller said: “In this debut novel, the author weaves an intricate story with fine characterization and plenty of surprises. The pace is relentless and the language vivid.”
Many writers frequent the Richmond District, including best-selling author Amy Tam. Even though she uses Chinatown as the setting in her five novels, including The Joy Luck Club, she said in an article in the Charlotte Observer on January 28, 2007, “There's a cooler, lesser-known part of town where the newest immigrants from China, Vietnam and Russia have settled.” You guessed it. In the Richmond District, particularly around Clement Street.
Death Game
Cheryl Swanson
306 pages
Zumaya Publications
Softcover $14.99
978-1-55410-325-6
PDF and HTML $6.99
978-1-55410-326-3
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