Beers & Queers - Midweek Novella Night

A quick read and a casual get-together over beer and casual bites. Let's discuss the novella, Cult of Loretta by Kevin Maloney.

OVERVIEW:
Kevin Maloney delivers Cult of Loretta (139 pages), like a shadowed face over campfire, a memory of destructive love, a web of relationships dysfunctional as they can get, all centered around whirlpool Loretta. “If a modern day mountain man came out of the wilderness with a story in his eye, this might be the thing he’d tell,” Brian Allen Carr says in his blurb. Loretta jumps off the page. I heard Maloney read a short story in a bar about a year ago and had a hard time separating the narrator from the writer. My impression was similar—that the story really happened, stemmed from a witty memory, that the typed page in his hand was just a prop.

EDITORIAL REVIEWS:
Cult of Loretta is a quick and wild ride, funny in a way that makes a campfire-listener shake his head with disbelief at the survivor. At times the story reads like a drug memoir, and there’s some raw and gross imagery I’d rather not revisit. Other than that, spend a day or two lost in Nelson’s unrelenting and tumultuous love story. Nelson’s here to tell the tale, to provide a deadpan screen for a melodramatic story about obsessive love that sticks.

We will Meetup at The Rose in Venice.

Each attendee will keep their own bar tab.