Rename that Book Contest

Well, I finally think I need to change the name of Dropcloth Angels. I’ve decided to make this a contest with prizes and everything. All you need to do is submit your entry as a response to this post and I’ll put the ten I like best into a Poll to be voted upon by my millions of adoring fans. In the event my millions of fans can’t make it out to vote, I’ll choose the winner from the top three – for which there will be prizes.

1st place winner will get a shout out as the genius who retitled my book, will get the opportunity to be a character in an upcoming novel, and a signed very limited (I’ll be having 5 proofs printed) edition of the renamed Dropcloth Angels mailed out to them.

2nd & 3rd will win the honour of knowing they are less loserly than those not chosen by a panel of your peers, and a signed copy of the renamed Dropcloth Angels, complete with a dirty poem on the inside cover.

There will only be five books printed in all. The other two already have homes; one will be heading across the pond to a friend in England, while the other will make a cross-country journey here in Canada.

For those who’ve read but need a refresher (and those who think they can rename it without having read it) I’ll place the summary below.

Good luck

DcA (dropcloth angels)

Synopsis

Part I: Unstoppable Force Meets an Edible Object

An emptiness echoes within Zane Ellis that he can’t seem to fill no matter how much blood, no matter how many he kills; his actual total is even lost to him, though their voices often find him late at night. But that’s only when they can out-scream the demon living within his head. He searches for a shining moment, a holy of holies: his dropcloth masterpiece. Disenchanted by his lack of creative progress Stateside, and feeling stifled by Gideon, his benefactor and purveyor of internet snuff, he spreads his wings and heads for the Great White North: to Canada—to kiss and kill; to snuff and tell. His first victim after arriving is a girl he comes to know as ‘boring-tasting Annie’, but there will be another.

Though he doesn’t know it, the demon’s true name is Syphilis, and is winning the battle for his mind.

Zane isn’t the only American who’s come to Toronto towing an imagined monster. Zoe Beaupre, a sharp-tongued young whore—together with a rude stuffed monkey named Purple—has come home from St. Louis to relax her well-pounded pussy and catch up with her reclusive older sister, Jeanne.

Perhaps it’s destiny that the Z’s should meet—consider it Karma, Fate, whatever the hell you want—but meet they do. Just not right away.

Zane, after scoping out the local scene, finds, and immediately begins to woo, an ivory skinned beauty named Jeanne. She is the last speaker of the day at a cancer survivors meeting, and steals his heart with her looks and sorrowful, well-woven tale. What Zane feels toward this girl is an alien thing; he’s never equated food with sex, so is both vexed and confused by the stirring in his loins during their conversation after the meeting.

He’d told Gideon he came to Canada to shoot one of their snuff movies, but what he doesn’t tell the old man is that he also came to capture, hopefully, an angel—the angel—which he’d freeze for all time: within him, upon canvas, and on page one of every newspaper in the country: not just another blood painting by the man the media so gleefully call Cannibalangelo, but the painting; his own Mona Lisa, sans head.

Of course, Jeanne finds him irresistible. How could she not? Others always found Zane as charming and handsome as he himself did. Why, sometimes he would stare for hours at his own reflection, marvelling in wonder at what his parents had wrought.

Jeanne doesn’t mention marvelling while regaling Zoe with the details surrounding her meeting of a nice young widower named David she’d met at the meeting, but Zoe can tell her sister is smitten. She is also beginning to suspect Jeanne is a cat-lady waiting to happen, and decides to help make this date with Mr. Beautiful happen.

Zoe also met a man while Jeanne was busy with her new guy, but doesn’t mention Brown Sugar, the young man she’d pleasured orally in exchange for heroin—or the fact he is only fourteen, which is a secret she plans on taking to her grave.

The night before Jeanne’s date with David, Zoe and her sister argue over Zoe’s absence from college in St. Louis. There are a great many things Zoe never told her sister. If Jeanne found out she was a heroin addicted hooker, how would it affect their relationship? All it would do is reinforce their mother’s low opinion of her. After the argument, Zoe storms out of the apartment, vowing to be gone by morning. She decides to have a few drinks at a shit-hole bar around the corner.

This is where the two Z’s meet for the first time, though each gives a false name for their own reasons; Zane calls himself Baudelaire, and Zoe introduces herself as Candace, her nom de whore.

Zoe sees the man named Baudelaire for the predator he is. She is very adept at reading people. To turn him away, she insults him enough that he should have left her alone, but his smile only widens. Scared shitless—though petulant, as always—she leaves the bar and heads for the apartment.

Zane, on the other hand, finds her both beautiful and as sharp as scalpel; a true kindred soul. Right about here is where he realizes what he felt with Jeanne might not be a bad thing, but is stronger for this girl. His feelings are so strong, in fact, that he allows her to walk out of his life forever; any follow-up meeting would end badly for her.

After a little soul-searching, Zoe decides to not be so selfish, and will stay in Toronto long enough to see how Jeanne’s date goes with her new geek. She even drives her to the man’s rural chalet for dinner before going out; Purple Monkey spends the trip out to the chalet riding the hood like a surf board, while Zoe suffers flu-like symptoms of withdrawal. Too bad she doesn’t get to meet David upon arriving at his house. She leaves quickly in order to get a fix. Her last words to her sister as she drives away are, “Don’t come home without your underwear, whore,” and then she is gone from her life forever. On the way back into Toronto, she becomes lost and doesn’t arrive at the apartment until much later. Getting stoned in a strange land has its drawbacks.

For Zane, his dinner date with Jeanne goes smashingly well, and the subsequent show they put on for Gideon breaks all previous web site records. He’d been correct in thinking she’d be a star, an angel even, but, much to his disappointment, not the one for whom he’d been searching. Before cleaning the chalet and leaving for home in Chicago, he returns Jeanne’s phone and clothes to her apartment, then searches for any evidence of him, and erases the message he left on her home phone.

As Zoe packs up the last of her things, she hears what she thinks is Jeanne returning home, but, as she frighteningly discovers, it is the man she’d met at the bar named Baudelaire, the creepy guy. She hides while he tosses the apartment, and then telephones the police after he leaves.

When the police arrive, they discover blood-splattered clothes, Jeanne’s cell phone—smashed—and a stash of heroin that falls from a duffel bag belonging to one unlucky whore. Not only is Zoe arrested for possession, but four days later is also now a ‘person of interest’ in the disappearance of one Jeanne Beaupre. Her thoughts (when she isn’t thinking about her missing sister and getting high), are as follows: “I’m fucked.” The purple monkey wholeheartedly agrees.

Upon discovering the girl he’d met at the bar is actually Jeanne’s sister, Zane does two things: first, he leaves his dropcloth painting, along with Jeanne’s remains, in a public place, so as to remove suspicion from the girl he knew as Candace; the second thing he does is come to grips with the new emotions stirring within his breast. He has no name for them, but thinks the feelings might be love. As he lingers at the scene of the angel painting, a small army of police cars and gawking revellers swarm the area. He gloats too long and is forced to kill a photographer who snaps his picture.

After her release from custody (even the possession charges are dropped in light of the extenuating circumstances; i.e., Jeanne’s death), a grief-stricken Zoe is met by her mother, the frost queen of Sarnia Ontario, and returns with her for Jeanne’s token funeral. During the service, the monkey is his usual caring self. Not.

The little prick even makes jokes about burying just a head.

Part II: Lucky Numbers, Car Sex, and Psychos

With nothing left to keep her in Canada, Zoe makes her way back to St. Louis, and tosses her pussy back in play. Cherry, her pimp, is happy to have her back.

Zoe believes the worst of her ordeal is over, that nothing could possibly top the shit storm she’d weathered. She is wrong: Simply Bob-wrong. The third customer of her very first night back to work has a very important message from a concerned Doctor: she is to keep silent about Toronto or bad things will happen. He punctuates this message by taking at gunpoint what she offers for money. He rapes her and leaves her, beaten and emotionally broken, in a dark and dingy parking lot. She can’t see it, but she is spared a similar fate to her sister by the man she later comes to know as Gideon—who actually wants her dead, but settles for ‘roughed up’ after Zane threatens to kill the old man if she’s harmed.

Puppy love is a powerful aphrodisiac.

Spared or not, Bob’s near murderous violation sends Zoe over the edge she’s been teetering on since Jeanne’s death, and she overdoses on the very drugs she uses to insulate herself from pain. As she is shaken awake, an accidental shove sends her roommate through a dressing mirror, nearly killing her.

Upon awaking, Zoe is strapped to a bed and is told she will be held for psychiatric evaluation. Her roommate’s boyfriend, a cop with whom she’s never seen eye to eye, informs hospital staff she is suicidal.

Zoe’s not happy, but Purple Monkey thinks it’s quite funny—at first anyway. This is no mere detox; Zoe is packed up and shipped to The Paradise Valley Mental Facility. Once there, she is to spend 21 days under observation and, if all goes well, will then be free to leave.

Gideon, after discovering her location, does everything he can to make sure Zoe never leaves the facility. Well, not alive anyway. As luck has it, there’s an orderly named Bud, who is a big fan of Gideon’s web site, and agrees to watch her. Watch her he does. So much so that he, like most men Zoe meets, wants her for his very own. His nightly visits begin to wear on Zoe, as she’s afraid to fall asleep.

If it weren’t for the friends she’s made within the facility, she’d likely go as bonkers as the doctors already believe her to be. Friends like Meat, Danny and Frye; all of whom become very protective of her over a very short period of time. None of them are around when, during a fight with a crazy goth bitch in the common room, Bud slaps her around and she stabs him through the hands with a pencil, but they are there for her when it counts.

During Zoe’s stay in the mental facility, Zane suffers an episode and murders a group (or so the doctor believes; without an actual head count there is no real way of knowing) of Jehovah’s Witnesses who’d come by his house to spread the good word. Gideon and his number one dog, Otto, discover Zane sitting at his kitchen table, nearly catatonic and covered in blood. Upon one entire wall of his living room, Zane has painted a portrait of the one girl Gideon wanted least to see: Zoe Beaupre. In his opinion, Zane can no longer be trusted to make the decisions needed to keep them and their business safe. Further, he believes the whore’s time has come to die and that Zane will understand after he’s had time to think about it.

Up until the fight with the goth girl, Zoe believes the night orderly, Bud Hawkins, to be creepy, but not dangerous-creepy. When he lets slip the fact he was told to watch her and the truth of her life-threatening situation, Zoe realizes she is never intended to leave the facility alive; and that something evil is coming for her. In an effort to gain some sort of leverage, and knowing that Bud finds her attractive, Zoe does her best to keep him romantically interested in hopes that he won’t hurt her anymore. She also discovers around the same time that the goth bitch, Mary, knows a little something about the man who killed Jeanne. More than that, she also knows how to get out of the facility undetected. A guarded truce is formed, and Mary, with the promised aid of her boyfriend Spider, will help her—along with Frye, Danny and Meat—escape before escape is no longer an option.

So began The Retribution Club. That’s because they had to call themselves something. Every group had a name. None of them know at this time, but that name, seemingly plucked from the air by Danny, will later become a prophecy.

The boys (who Zoe had taken to calling ‘her knights’), are speaking of Zoe’s escape in the common room one evening, and are overheard by Bud as he sits just around the corner. Bud learns Mary’s secret about how she is able to come and go from the facility, and that it is actually his own key she plans to steal. Bud relays this information on to his benefactor, Gideon, and plans are made to silence the girl for good.

Gideon calls a man named Spike, a former patient and contract killer, to sneak into the hospital and kill Zoe. Spike agrees, and informs Gideon he’d be bringing along his sons to help.

On the night Zoe plans on leaving (but still has no key to the elevator), Bud corners her in her room and slashes her wrist. Then he calls for a nurse, claiming Zoe is trying to kill herself. Zoe passes out as Gert, the night nurse, along with Bud, take her to the infirmary for the night.

Just as all hope seems lost, and Zoe would be strapped down to a bed when the killers came for her, Mary sneaks into the infirmary with Bud’s key. She loosens Zoe’s straps and promises to come back when the night nurse goes for her regularly scheduled nap. Things are looking up. While Zoe awaits the goth girl’s return, she leaves her bed to search the infirmary’s cabinets for a weapon or two … just in case.

Much to Bud’s dismay (because this is when he’d told Gideon to send the men for Zoe), Gert decides against taking her nap, and also warns him she plans to report what the girl said in regard to his actions this evening. This isn’t the first time Gert pisses him off; there are many memories he has of her fucking him over just to make him look bad. Maybe it’s the pills he’s been shucking down his throat since Zoe stabbed him with the pencil, maybe it’s just because he’s finally cracked, but he thinks it’s a good idea to kill that old cunt. So he beats her into pizza paste with a bowling pin. With ten minutes to spare before the men are supposed to arrive, Bud makes up his mind to send Zoe off with a good fucking, and heads for the infirmary.

As luck would have it, the weapons Zoe lifted from a cabinet would save her life; two syringes filled with a paralyzing agent. When Bud comes for her, she stabs him with the needles and leaves him drooling and blinking on the floor. She’s met at the doorway of the infirmary by Frye who, along with Danny, Meat and Mary, plan on getting her safely on the elevator.

When the group reach the elevator (an elevator which only travels to two floors—P2 and psychiatric floor), they see the car is moving, and hide across the hall in a small room to wait for whoever is in the elevator to pass them by. In Zoe’s mind, there was no ‘whoever’ about it; it was the killers.

After Spike orders his younger son, Lou, to stay at the car, he and his oldest, Adam, head up in the elevator with the key provided by Gideon’s contact, Bud. When the two men have passed by the mess Bud made of the night nurse, and head toward the infirmary, Zoe and the entire group (after deciding they should all leave) take the elevator down.

Spike and Adam discover Bud, frozen and half naked, on the floor of the infirmary. Just as Spike is asking where the girl is, he hears the elevator ‘ding’, and sends Adam running down the hall. Spike stays with Bud, who is going to die anyway, but will be brought with them to a cottage they rented so Spike can take his frustrations out on the orderly for causing him stress.

On parking level 2, Lou (Spike’s younger son) watches as a girl, who looks strikingly similar to the girl his dad’s supposed to be upstairs killing, runs past the car and out the nearest door. He tries to call his brother’s cell phone, but can’t get through to him. He then he tries to use the elevator, but, without any key, can’t make it move. Pissed off with his inept father and brother, Lou places a call to his hero, the man he believes called for this assassination in the first place: Zane Ellis. He soon learns, after speaking to Zane, that anyone who touches the girl dies, slowly and painfully. Lou decides it might be safer for him to get away from his father, so he takes off before he and Adam come down.

Just like Mary said: her boyfriend, Spider, is waiting for them outside the parking garage doors. The group pile into his ancient, canary yellow Beetle and make good their escape. As they do, Spider’s idea of get-away music blares from shoddy speakers. The current track is Rainbow Connection, as sung by Kermit the Frog, and they travel at an ear-flattening 20mph.

Part III: Big Balls, Vengeance, & One Fiery Hoop

After Lou’s phone call, a very pissed-off Zane Ellis pays a visit to Gideon. He brings along with him the head of Gideon’s Secretary and a camera. He takes incriminating pictures of the doctor, tells him to leave Zoe alone or else, then leaves. Gideon has no choice but to go along with Zane’s wishes.

Spider, whose name was actually Seth (which Zoe believes matches his geeky appearance wonderfully), takes them to a hotel just over the Missouri/Illinois border, in East St. Louis. From there, after much argument against the plan from Zoe, they decide to find Zoe’s dropcloth killer and make him pay for what he did. They start with the one person who might know where to find him: an ex boyfriend of Mary’s named Clive had once taken her to a party where, on screens throughout the house, a snuff movie played for cheering crowds.

During Zoe and Frye’s abduction of Mary’s ex from a bar called Mud Vein, Meat is killed and Frye is wounded by two friends of Clive Purdy. The group escape and pull into an abandoned train yard to bandage Frye’s bullet wound, and then question their hog-tied fledgling cannibal, Clive. At first, the young man tells them nothing. After Mary stuffs a gun down his pants and begins a quick countdown from five, he talks. He tells them all he knows, which isn’t much more than the name of a man who would know Cannibalangelo. He tells them to find an old retired killer clown named Harry Funshine, or another who lives with him named Chin Choi, in southern Michigan.

Zoe and company leave Clive tied and bloody, as hundreds of interested rats close in on him from the darkness of the surrounding derelict trains. The best the group can do for Frye and Meat is leave them on a park bench and call 911. They wait until the ambulance arrives, and then leave for Michigan.

The group finds the man Clive spoke of: Harry Funshine. He’s an old Chinese man with a love for little dogs and the circus. He tells Zoe he made snuff movies long ago with Gideon, but that they were fakes. He knows where to find Gideon, Cannibalangelo’s controller, and offers to come along. Harry tells them that Gideon would know exactly where to find Zane Ellis, but is a very dangerous man too. The four remaining members, along with Harry and his three dogs, head to Chicago.

The doctor isn’t home when they drive by his house later that day, so the group takes a motel room to get some sleep before returning. After waking from a horrible dream, Zoe takes Seth’s car (and Harry’s three dogs that Seth refused to allow into the room) for a drive, to clear her head. She eventually finds herself in front of the doctor’s house. As she is preparing to head back to the motel, Gideon leaves his house and drives away in his car. Zoe follows.

The doctor drives slowly past an alley, and then takes off around a corner. Zoe is still watching him and almost runs over a man walking across the street. A man she recognizes immediately: it was the creepy Baudelaire guy from Toronto; the man she’d last seen in her sister’s apartment: Zane Ellis.

Long after he enters a building with a cardboard sign outside, reading ‘A.A. Meeting-8pm’, Zoe prepares to drive back to get the group, then return, but a police officer pulls up and says ‘Hi’.

Thinking quickly, she tells him she is heading into the A.A. meeting, and then goes inside. Once there, she watches the killer as he speaks in front of an assembled crowd of thirty-or-so people, and makes a complete ass out of himself in the process. Her rage grows as she watches him speak to a skinny man across the room. After the meeting, Zoe leaves to wait for him, so she can follow him home. She sees there is something very wrong with him, like his mind and body are shutting down on him. Emboldened by his lessened state, she steps out of her car in front of his house. When she opens the door, Harry’s youngest dog races from the car and runs through the open front door of the man’s house.

Zoe goes after the dog, finds Zane holding the dog up by its neck, and hits him with a large vase, crumpling the side of the cannibal’s head. As she turns, she’s shot with a tranquilizer dart by Gideon, who’d set up the whole thing from his cell phone in his car, and couldn’t be more disappointed with the poor quality of their ‘fight scene’. Zoe falls across the body of the cannibal and slips into unconsciousness just as Gideon shoots Poco, the dog she’d followed in.

Gideon telephone’s Otto for a cleanup, and then helps Otto dump Zoe into Otto’s van (for him to kill, and to get it on tape), and Zane into Gideon’s car so he could be taken to a doctor.

Something Zoe didn’t know earlier was that Harry had been sleeping with his dogs in the back of the Bug the entire time she’d been out driving. When Harry awakes, he sees Otto load one body into his van, and one into Gideon’s car. He also sees the big German throw a small dog into the back of the van. Enraged and scared for the life of his young dog, Harry decides to be the hero he never was and follows Otto.

The doctor calls ahead to a suspended plastic surgeon, a man who’s done work for him in the past, to ready him for a new patient. He arrives at the doctor’s house to find the man stoned, and his girlfriend naked. He leaves Zane in their care and hurries off.

Otto takes Zoe to an old abandoned school with a tall wooden fence surrounding the perimeter of the yard. He taunts her as he secures her arms to an ancient swing set while listening to Bach on his iPod. He sets a video camera up on the hood of the van, pulls a knife, and approaches. Zoe prays, and thinks she sees heaven, but the chariot racing toward her is kind of ugly. It’s canary yellow.

Gideon returns to Zane’s house to wait for the men who Otto was to send over to search for the pictures Zane took of Gideon with the head of his secretary, but the men don’t come. He finally decides to not bother looking for the pictures, and burns the house down. As he gets into his car, his cell phone rings. He picks up and speaks to someone he thought would never call him, but who has something very interesting to discuss with him about the girl who’s been causing so much trouble for him.

Around the same time Gideon is dropping Zane off at the doctor’s house, Harry is busy planning an assault on a schoolyard to save his dog (and the girl if all goes well). He has a plan in his mind when he busts through the wooden wall surrounding the playground behind the wheel of Seth’s 77 Bug, but a faulty brake pedal sends him racing at Otto and Zoe while music blares from the broken radio. He strikes Otto, cuts him in half, and knocks the poles out from under Zoe, throwing her ten feet away, where she comes to a rolling stop—scuffed and bruised, but alive. The car is completely smashed, so, after collecting Zoe and his dog, Harry drives Otto’s van back to the motel. Together, they relate their tale to the rest of the group. Mary asks Zoe if she’s sure the guy they came for, Zane Ellis, is dead. Zoe isn’t sure of this—she was unconscious when she was taken—so they all pile into the van while Harry, after offering, walks to the office and checks them out of the motel.

Upon nearing the killer’s house, it stands in smoking ruins, and several small fires still burn in the immediate area. Whatever closure Zoe is hoping for has gone up in flames. After much debate, they head to the doctor’s home, intending to break in and find proof, as well as remove Harry’s fake tapes from Gideon’s home before Zoe goes to the police.

Danny finds the back door of the house open and the group—minus Seth, who’d run back to the van after a scare outside the house, and Harry, who says he’ll go get Seth—enter the house and begin packing up evidence. While Zoe and Mary are busy ransacking the office, Danny, the firebug, leaves them and explores the house. Just as the girls are readying to leave, Harry enters the house, followed by Gideon, who is carrying a shot gun. Harry had double-crossed Zoe. He cries as he holds a gun on her and Mary. Gideon tells them of Harry’s earlier phone call, and how he ‘copped’ a plea. Gideon orders Harry to shoot Zoe, but he hesitates.

Outside, Seth awakes under the van, after someone—Harry!—hit him with a rock. He rolls to his feet to seek vengeance, but falls in the gutter. Eventually, he finds his feet.

As Zoe contemplates her own mortality, she watches as Seth stumbles into the room, falls, compliments Gideon on his lovely decor, then walks over and hits Harry with a rock concealed up his sleeve. After hitting Harry, he falls unconscious to the floor.

As Gideon is giving his pre-murder evil dude speech, Danny, who’d been busy while he was away, dumps a jelly/gasoline mixture over the doctor, and sets him aflame. The shot gun in the doctor’s hands goes off, Danny disappears, and Zoe dives for Harry’s discarded gun. She finds it just in time to turn and see Gideon doff his coat and extinguish the flames on his boots. He is just raising the shot gun as Zoe aims Harry’s gun, closes her eyes, and fires in his general direction. His shot rips plaster from the wall just above her head, exposing a false compartment filled with cash. Her shot takes off his trigger finger. When she opens her eyes, his gun lies beside him and he is writhing on the floor, screaming as he cradles his right hand.

During the entirety of the final few chapters, Zoe tries to emulate what her favourite cops might do in her situation. As she gazes down upon the incapacitated snuff mogul, and then at the money scattered about the floor and stuffed in the walls, she thinks of another thing she’s seen cops do on television. They take the money.

With only a short time until daylight, Zoe instructs her friends to take what money they can carry and leave. She would find them after things blew over.

Within a matter of days, the world knows of a girl who, after escaping during an altercation between her captors (a man named Chin Choi, and his partner, a Doctor Barthomew Gideon), singlehandedly took down the largest known snuff ring in The United States. She is a hero and will remain one for another fourteen minutes.

Lou Schrickt, after searching for weeks, finally finds his hero. Zane is recuperating after an operation. Zane feels great, and wishes to leave the wonderful doctor and his nurse something to show his gratitude. With the leftover paint from the doctor’s bathroom, Zane paints his dropcloth masterpiece (complete with heads), and he and Lou drive off for parts unknown.

Following Doctor Gideon’s trial, Zoe spends a few weeks doing talk shows, and then is able to slip away without notice.

She meets up with Mary, Seth, and Frye at an old barn in the country, where they divide the money taken from Gideon’s house, and swap stories. After a silence falls on the group, they go their separate ways.

Gideon’s trial is both swift and decisive. He finds himself in prison not long after his wounds heal. He is ushered to his cell, and, upon meeting his new cell mate, realizes they’d met before. The man’s name is Petey, and he’d been a patient of the doctors. Petey kills his victims with hand puppets made in the victim’s image. To Gideon’s surprise, his new cell mate had been anticipating his arrival, and has a gift for him.

Gideon’s puppet looks quite a bit like him—a fact he realizes as he lies dying.

Gideon died on a Thursday. It was meatloaf day.