Ed Falco Sampler. Ed Falco

      Introduction

      Anyone taking a quick glance at my career as a writer could be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that I have the literary equivalent of ADHD (AttentionDeficit Hyperactivity Disorder). I've written and published poems, short fictions (what others call prose poems), short stories, plays, novels, and various experimentations with new media writing. In addition to working in multiple genres, I've also tried my hand at differing approaches to writing, from traditional to what we now call Postmodern. Most recently, starting only a few years ago, I got interested in popular fiction. I wrote a sci-fi, apocalypse novel, and then, before I was able to find the right ending to that novel, my agent—who also happens to be the agent for the Puzo family--offered me a chance to write a prequel to The Godfather. It was an extraordinary stroke of good luck. I jumped at it, and wrote The Family Corleone, which is forthcoming on May 8th from Grand Central Books.

      This theoretical person glancing at my literary career might reasonably assume that The Family Corleone is yet another manifestation of my literary ADHD. I don't see it that way. I see myself as a writer with a few obsessive themes that I return to again and again in a variety of forms and genres. I'm interested in monsters in all their shapes and manners, and I am consistently interested in the monster under the mask of civility. Much of my writing, regardless of the working aesthetics or the genre or any other formal concern, comes around to this thematic interest—and naturally, from there, to the struggle, the war, within characters trying to repress the monster and live a civilized, a decent, life. Take, uncle, Grant killed a man—and throughout the novel we see his struggle as he tries to figure out who he is: a murderer most interested in money and power, or an artist capable of love and a decent life. At the heart of Wolf Point, my other novel from Unbridled, there's a monstrous photograph which holds a powerful attraction for T, the central character, and which he must come to see as monstrous before he can begin to change. As for my short stories, the theme is everywhere in them. In my Unbridled collection, Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha, see "The Revenant," or "Silver Dollars," or "The Artist," or, in a title that won't win a prize for subtlety, "Monsters." In so much of my writing, and in all three of my books from Unbridled, there are characters at war with what is dark and dangerous in their deepest selves—or, as Yeats puts it masterfully in one of my favorite lines of poetry, "in the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart."

      I can't talk much about The Family Corleone before it's officially released, but I can tell you this much: Book One is titled Mostro, which is Italian for monster, and book two is titled Guerra, which is Italian for war.

      It may look like it at a glance, but I really don't have a literary form of ADHD. Actually, quite the opposite.

      Ed Falco

      Blacksburg, VA December 12, 2011