| The Sequel to LOW END is currently in production. Gary
Morrissey is once again under the scrutiny of the
local law enforcement community when he and his
dive buddy discover a murder victim chained to
Long Island Sound’s Execution Rocks. The
action once again crisscrosses Westchester County
as a mass murderer, with a penchant for
reenacting famous homicides and historic
executions, leads Gary on a chase through the
natural as well as the occult.  Gary traces a voodoo cult with Haitian
roots down to New Orleans where the action
continues around the clock!
It was a Low End,
but it’s only
the beginning…
My first completed novel, Low End,
was a done deal as far as the actual writing was
concerned, by August of 2000. However, in that
embryonic stage, as I see it now, I considered it
only to be a source of entertainment for my small
handful of friends. There were no grand plans of
publication in my befuddled noggin; I simply
figured I'd spin off a few photocopies to be
distributed as Christmas gifts—and dubious
quality Christmas gifts at that!
Even with so little pretense in my
strategy, my conscience demanded that the
manuscript be bounced off one of my most literate
friends, Keith Legg. “You know, I’m really
busy right now” he said as I handed him the
sheaf of paper, “so I can’t promise you
I’ll get to it any time soon.” Well, at
least it was in his hands, and Christmas was
still four months away. Two days later, the phone
rang. “You kept me up until four in the
morning!” He explained further. “At
eight or so, I thought I’d just knock off a
chapter of your book before bed. Couldn’t
put the thing down! What a wild ride!”
With that kind of endorsement from a
well-read English teacher, the plot thickened.
Why not try to get published? Get published,
who, me? As any new author can tell you, you just
can’t approach a major publishing house
without a literary agent and you can’t get
an honest literary agent unless some large
publishing house has published something of yours
already! This knowledge nearly discouraged me
from the attempt, but I figured I’ve got
a day job, crummy as it is, I’ll just plug
away at pestering publishers and see what happens.
A year of rejections, some kindly, some helpful,
some downright nasty, ended with a contract with
American Book Publishing based in Salt Lake City,
Utah. The editing and pre-release chores almost
filled the entire next two years. Low End was
finally released for Internet sale in July of
2003 and slated for general retail in January
2004.
Everyone who knows me and has thumbed
through Low End has the same question: You
are Gary Morrissey, right? And to everyone I
have the same answer: No! Then they’d
invariably say: But Gary is a musician, and he
was divorced, and he lived in Yonkers—and
that’s your story as well. While that is
all true, I merely picked and chose from among
the baggage I carry to supply Gary with a
three-dimensional personality. He is not me, I am
not him.
Deep End: The Wreck of the Eddie Fitz
is a continuation of Low End. I had
become fond of our Gary, and from feedback
I’d received from many readers; other folks
have warmed to him as well. I had intentionally
left the first novel with a somewhat open end.
Life never delivers complete closure. The way I
saw it, why shouldn’t art imitate life? An added
benefit of leaving some loose ends was that the
chance for a sequel would always be there.
The book you will be holding in your
hands was actually an open file on my computer a
month after my fateful conversation with Keith
Legg, yet I didn’t stand with Gary and Brad
in the parking lot of the New Rochelle Municipal
Marina until July of 2003. Life got in
Gary’s way, much as it had gotten in my way
and for the two of us, almost four years had
passed. It required a conscious effort on my part
to help Gary get back into the fray.
While Low End was a story of one
man’s fractured ethics doing battle with
another man’s paranoia, Deep End is a
tale of mass delusion and one man’s
compulsion to murder. The seed of an idea came in
the person of Dr. Norman Dobbs, a minister and
wonderful man of the cloth, who is battling
voodoo’s stranglehold on the nation of
Haiti. His recounts of spiritual battle in the
slums of what should and could be a Caribbean
paradise are truly unique and inspiring
The other brain-jog that kicked off this
story was a question my nine-year-old daughter
Veronica asked. “Dad, what is the difference
between a serial killer and a mass murderer? Kids
ask the darndest questions, especially these
days. I tried to describe Jeff Dahmer and Adolph
Hitler, the two examples that came to mind. My
answer to her? A serial killer enjoys killing and
often culls from the same demographic group to
select victims and frequently uses the same means
of death. A mass murder harbors deep hatred for a
group of people and kills them by any possible
means in an attempt to achieve a goal. I noticed
as I spoke that my definitions had an overlapping
area. What would you call a man who enjoys
killing, wants a certain group of people dead to
further a plan, and uses a methodological model
or models to craft his crimes? Is he a serial
killer or a mass murderer? At that point do we
merely use his tally as a deciding point? What
benchmark in the number of victims separates a
serial killer form a mass murderer?
I’m not a criminologist, psychologist or
sociologist and have no real credentials or even
desire to answer the question definitively, it is
a very interesting point to ponder. I let Gary
sweat this one for me.
Frankly, I’m slightly concerned
about this book. Why? Well, there is always the
famous curse of the sophomore effort to
overcome. Readers who liked the depth of
character development in Low End may not
be as happy with Deep End. Are the
characters less real? No, I didn’t wish to
squander a huge quantity of redundant ink
re-revealing Gary Morrissey to the reader who
already knows him from the first book,
that’s all. Does the reader have to
have read Low End to enjoy this book? No,
I don’t believe this to be true. With that
said, I think there will be a better
understanding and appreciation if Low End
is read first.
I sincerely hope you enjoy this novel,
thanks for picking it up. I had a great time
writing it as I always enjoy spending time with
my dear friends from the old neighborhood. They
were the best of times; they were the worst of
times… Oh hell, Dickens penned that one
already. Pity, I could have really used that line
here.
Hary G. Pellegrin
Scotia, New York
October 2003
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