Louie

About the Book

About the Story

Perhaps it was the ambience and his cynicism as a longtime newsman, now “journalist.” The fantasy of his screenplay, later turned into a novel, Louie — Demons & Angels in Business Suits, was conceived in the fall-winter of 1994 at Bayfield, at the top of Northern Wisconsin. He was there to relax after finishing a heavily researched teleplay on the cure of childhood leukemia—the story of physician scientists Emil Frei III and Emil Freireich, the two brash, young pioneers of combination chemotherapy at the National Cancer Institute. After two years of writing The Two Emils, The Children’s Cure and the final draft mailed to his first agent, he holed up in an empty motel on the shores of Lake Superior for a new writing challenge. Across the bay were the Apostle Islands. The motel faced Madeline Island where one summer on a vacation with his wife, Mary, from “the news business" (he hated that phrase), he had searched the old Indian cemetery for any grave that resembled Longfellow's legendary “Hiawatha,” though the poem was fixed in Michigan.

Two pages of the 1994 Information Please Almanac, “Historical Highlights of Drugs in America,” consumed his interest. He thought if he included those facts in a screenplay, the kids of the world might decide not to fool with drugs, if the movie were produced. The article and the nearly frozen bay helped to inspire his notion of writing an allegory about Satan's chief drug pusher. Also, he once spoke to Mary about redeeming bad doctors and lawyers in Hell or Heaven. “After they die, it’s not too late to straighten out their careers.” Perhaps the thought had a slight ring of Dante’s The Divine Comedy.

Since childhood, the writer has believed that God exists, but he isn’t sure about Heaven, and he discounts the fires of Hell as a warning, to behave. The fantasy of Louie grew and centered on a young, fictional alchemist, Louie DeValle, executed in Paris in the Fourteenth Century for fraud and other misdeeds. Added to this recipe was a mystery mountain somewhere on the planet, made of a silicon-based tranquilizer (pure fiction) that shone twice a year at the equinoxes. A beacon for the druggies? An alchemist would like that. The fantasy rapidly grew, based on the reality of drugs used by virtually every culture back in time to the present. Imagine a mountain in Northern India, say in Kashmir, made of drugs—wanted by Satan to tranquilize the world.

After Louie is beheaded in the King's palace—among his crimes he had seduced the Queen—he is mentored by the fallen angel Satan and put in charge of running his worldwide drug operation, and searching for the shining mountain. Satan, later known as Syd “to attract the suckers upstairs,” had learned of the mountain from two other fallen angels, and called it Mt. Halcyon, and its property, a powerful tranquilizer, Terra Halcyon. He tells Louie when he feeds the supply to the atmosphere it will keep the entire human race tranquilized for his purpose: Wars and rebellions will be unnecessary, since everyone “and their cats and dogs" will be dependent and work for him. Then he can “put the arm on” God and return to Heaven as his equal partner. Or else!

Syd’s truckloads of money and gold, and his opulent palace are his loves—only a brimstone shower away from Lucifer University where advanced courses in corruption are taught by his top professors.

Enough about Syd, a.k.a. Satan. Louie, Satan’s key demon, is both antagonist and hero of the story, once the beautiful angel Helen makes her presence. As Heaven’s drug czar, her role is to stop Louie in his tracks. But she always fails. He would love to seduce her, as their hormones returned on the surface, but when he tries, she disappears. She has another mission from Albert, her Chief of Staff, who believes he can redeem the soul of a demon. “Get Louis to return with you, and I’ll wo

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