Author's 'Bomb' Set Off For Free On Internet
An Oregon author offers an eerily prophetic novel

By Jeff Baker
Originally published in The Oregonian, August 18, 2000

Andrew Vachss is going one better than Stephen King and giving away a new novel on the World Wide Web. Free. No honor system. No download charges. No strings attached.

The only problem is finding it. Vachss—an Oregon author who won't say exactly where he lives, citing security reasons—has made an arrangement to post his novel "A Bomb Built in Hell" on Amazon.com, one of the most popular sites on the Web. Yet if you call up www.amazon.com and try to find it, good luck. There's no mention on the home page or in the site's books section. A search of Vachss' name yields only his previously published work, and a title search gives you some books about bombs.

There is a long address that will take you to the novel: www.amazon.comlexec/obidos/tg/feature/-/65277/104-000090173079104.
Got that? Great.

A faster, more efficient way to find "A Bomb Built in Hell" is to go through The Zero, Vachss' extraordinary Web site at www.vachss.com. It's one of the most extensive author sites on the Web and one of the most useful. There's the information you might expect about Vachss' long career as a crime novelist (he's written 15 books, not counting "A Bomb Built in Hell" and some comic books) and his work as an attorney representing children. More importantly, there is a large amount of resources and links to sites about child abuse, mental health and dozens of other issues Vachss has dealt with in his work.

There's also a gallery of photos of "dogs of the Zero," many of them Vachss' favorite animal, the pit bull. The often-mistrained, misunderstood dogs play a big emotional part in Vachss' new novel, "Dead and Gone," which will be published next month by Alfred A. Knopf, Vachss' "conventional" publisher.

"A Bomb Built in Hell" was written in 1973. In an introduction posted on Amazon, Vachss (rhymes with ax) says it "was unanimously rejected by publishers. They professed to love the writing, but felt the events depicted were considered a 'political horror story' and not remotely realistic. The rejection letters make interesting reading today. Included in the 'lack of realism' category were such things as Chinese youth gangs and the fall of Haiti. And, of course, the very idea of someone entering a high school with the intent of destroying every living person inside was just too ... ludicrous."

Vachss goes on to write that "A Bomb Built in Hell" "was meant to be a doctorate thesis in criminology without the foot-notes, exploring such areas as the connection between child abuse and crime, and the desperate need of unbonded, dangerous children to form 'families of choice.'"

Vachss took portions of "A Bomb Built in Hell" and incorporated them into his novel "Hard Candy," but rejected offers—some from the same publishers who originally had turned it down—to publish it. Three chapters have been posted on Amazon each business day since Aug. 10, and the 59,000-word novel is available to anyone with enough paper to print it.

Fans of Vachss' ultra-tough series character, Burke, will be reassured to learn that even though much of "Dead and Gone" is set in Portland, their hero has not lost his edge. Burke stays at the Governor Hotel, doesn't complain about the weather and has a violent encounter with some thugs in O'Bryant Square, which Vachss accurately sketches in a few sentences:

"I never found it empty, no matter what time I went past. Homeless nomads with clear plastic sacks of recyclables they'd rescued from the trash, students with their backpacks and attitudes, burnt-out runaways. A guy in a business suit was meeting a woman who couldn't have been his wife from the way he kept eye-sweeping for anybody he might know, a young girl was drawing something in a large tablet, two men in their 30s openly shared a joint. And pigeons. Plenty of pigeons."

Andrew Vachss will appear at Borders Books & Music, 708 S.W. Third Ave., at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 27; and at Borders Tigard, 16920 S.W 72nd Ave., Tigard, at 7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 28.