Sean Taylor Shares the Skinny on THE NEW DEAL: MASKS AND MUTATIONS!

If you need someone to blame for this book, here I am. It’s simple math. A + B = C, with C being this book. If you’ll keep reading for a moment or two, I’ll attempt to explain.

A: What If

“What if” is a writer’s favorite game to play. It’s the basis of all stories. What if King Lear happened on a farm but from the POV of a “bad” heir? That’s Jane Smiley’s A THOUSAND ACRES, for the record. What if spiritual samurai tried to hold off imperialism from an invading and technologically superior force? That’s both history of Japan and the basis for a little space movie called STAR WARS. What it space were the wide-open West and we sent people out to explore it? You guessed it, STAR TREK.

“What if” keeps the fictional world from becoming stagnant. It’s the remix that word-artists use to create something new from something borrowed, something blue. “What if” is the glue (sorry for the cliché) writers make from the hooves of both classic and often forgotten literary steeds.

Now that we’ve established that, what about this one: What if the American public had a scapegoat on which to blame all the bad stuff from the 1920s and 1930s, such as the stock market crash, increasing crime, etc.? And what it that scapegoat weren’t a race but a whole new kind of people, a new generation of people born with amazing powers, some that could stay hidden in public and others that didn’t have that luxury?

B: Man Vs. Man  

Two super hero-themed books have always stuck with me as being important to the American cultural/creative landscape. The first is the X-Men adventure God Loves, Man Kills. It’s a masterpiece of Us vs. Them literature. The second is the Wildcards series edited by George R.R. Martin et al, particularly the first book with its crazy trip through American history with the added benefit (or detriment) of Aces and Jokers.

But this Us vs. Them theme sadly isn’t confined to books and movies. We all know that. Without racism, the X-Men wouldn’t have been so popular since that was their story to tell (only slicing it in a fantastical way).  The Wildcards books would have had little to say beyond mere escapist fiction without the realities of McCarthyism and anti-socialist and anti-communist politics at their core.

I’m not talking about simple man vs. man plot structures here. This is far deeper than the noble sheriff vs. the bad cattle rustler, or even the disillusioned copper vs. the vicious gangster. I’m talking about the propensity of human beings to focus on the things that make us different and use those very things at best to segregate the greater (us) from the lesser (them), or at worst the right and proper (us) from the evil and should be gotten rid of.

It’s one of the things that makes us rightly and truly suck as people, but it makes us great fodder for stories, fantastic fodder for compelling stories.

It’s the fodder at the heart of this collection of stories, which brings us to…

C: This Book

At its simplest, this book asks the question, “What if the X-Men happened in a generic way right around the Great Depression and took all the blame for, well, everything?” But it didn’t stay there. With the input of several writers I trust, value, and am jealous of, it became more than just a rip-off of the X-Men. It became something wonderfully and truly pulp, something that took the ideas of masked men with guns and fedoras from the realm of possibility into the realm of the fantastic, of superheroics.

The pulp era is filled with costumed do-gooders, but most of them were what my first super-fiction editor staunchly referred to as “mere vigilantes.” (A super hero, after all, had to have super-powers, according to him.) Men and women with guns. Men and women who were tremendous athletes, but nonetheless merely human.

This volume takes those men and women farther. But rather than putting the superhuman on a pedestal and seeing him or her as a god or goddess, it takes a more realistic approach. As I said above, we humans don’t have a good track record welcoming the new and different, especially when it frightens the bejeeszus out of us.

The title is an obvious riff on President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s political stab at rejuvenating the country. Only in this case the new deal is not what history tells us. It’s a new kind of human. The new and different. The thing no longer in the shadows that frightens the bejeezus out of us.

How the people involved “deal” with that new is what makes the stories in this collection worth your time and money.

So welcome to THE NEW DEAL: MASKS AND MUTATIONS.

I hope you enjoy your trip to the past that never was.

Sean Taylor
Creator of The New Deal: Masks and Mutations
September 30, 2016
Atlanta, Ga.

HEROES AND HISTORY IN THE CROSSHAIRS- ‘THE NEW DEAL: MASKS AND MUTATIONS” DEBUTS FROM PRO SE PRODUCTIONS

A cutting edge Publisher of Genre Fiction, Pro Se Productions proudly announces the release of THE NEW DEAL: MASKS AND MUTATIONS.  A collection organized by Sean Taylor, THE NEW DEAL turns the best in New Pulp authors today loose on the concept of super powers in a real world setting at the end of the 1920s.  The anthology is now available in print and digital formats.

“THE NEW DEAL,” explains Tommy Hancock, Partner in and Editor in Chief of Pro Se Productions, “asks the question ‘What if Super Powers were a thing at one of the most explosive points in our history?’ And this taut, thrilling anthology is most definitely the answer to that.  Each story tackles both the nostalgic view we have of the Golden Age of Comics and Super Heroes as well as the actual ramifications of something like this happening when the world was well on its way to Hell already.  From sentimental to terrifying, THE NEW DEAL: MASKS AND MUTATIONS delivers on every note, pushing readers into a world of fedoras and movie matinees that has so much more hidden under the surface.”

The Jazz Age is over and the Great Depression and Dust Bowl are ravaging across the United States. People need someone to blame. Luckily for a population who needs a scapegoat, the next wave of human evolution has begun, and it couldn’t have chosen a worse time to be born.

Men and women with amazing powers now fly across the sky, turn their skin into gold, and block bullets with their bare hands. Some take to crime. Some hide their powers for their own safety. Some seek the Underground Railroad for safe haven and a new life in Mexico. Some try to fight the good fight and turn the tide of public opinion as heroes. All of them are in the wrong place at the wrong time in a wounded, terrified, and violent country.

In this collection from Pro Se Productions, Sean Taylor, D. Alan Lewis, Lance Stahlberg, Sean Dulaney, Andrea Judy, and Tommy Hancock spin history ’round like a top to create an alternate reality both comfortably familiar and strangely new for readers of action, adventure, and crime stories. THE NEW DEAL: MASKS AND MUTATIONS. From Pro Se Productions

Featuring an amazing cover by Timothy Standish and cover design and print formatting by Antonino Lo Iacono, THE NEW DEAL: MASKS AND MUTATIONS is available now at Amazon and Pro Se’s own store  for 15.00.

This exciting super hero anthology is also available as an Ebook, designed and formatted by Lo Iacono for only $2.99 for the Kindle and for most digital formats via Smashwords.

For more information on this title, interviews with the author, or digital copies to review this book, contact Pro Se Productions’ Director of Corporate Operations, Kristi King-Morgan at directorofcorporateoperations@prose-press.com.

To learn more about Pro Se Productions, go to www.prose-press.com. Like Pro Se on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ProSeProductions.