SRF Heavy Industries

Be one of the first 100 people to pre-order The Nature of Monsters by Ronald Damien Malfi and we’ll eat the shipping. That’s right, just $20 gets you the book shipped to you. You pay nothing extra. Plus, we’ll make sure he signs it for you. This offer will not last, so order now. (Books are expected to ship out the first week of September, 2006)

“Love is the seed embedded in the skin,” Donna whispered, “germinating.”

Robert Crofton, a socially inept and naïve young farm-boy, arrives in Baltimore to write his first novel and to reacquaint himself with an old hometown friend: poet-turned-prizefighter Rory Van Holt. In an effort to resume their peculiar and mysterious friendship, Robert Crofton abruptly ensconces himself in Rory Van Holt’s circle of friends. Robert soon finds himself sinking deeper and deeper into the quagmire that is their lifestyle. They are corrupt and privileged socialites, damaged by extraordinary wealth, gluttony, greed, arrogance, and power. Dreamlike the characters float in and out of Robert’s life with inebriated casualness while Robert’s innocence invites these characters to subtly abuse and ridicule him while also accepting him, for the purpose of their own relief against monotony, into their monstrous society.

When Nigel Sweeny, Robert’s eccentric and doomed cousin, falls is love with Rory Van Holt’s fiancée, Donna Taylor, they all suddenly find themselves trapped in a bizarre and often contradictory love-quadrangle.

The Nature of Monsters is both uniquely modern and delicately classic in its style and execution. The story is an exercise in human frailty and love, while exploring the struggle between personal gratification and the damning, acquisitive allure of monetary wealth.

The Nature of Monsters
by Ronald Damien Malfi
8.5″ x 5.5″, 336 pages, paperback
ISBN: 0-9786761-0-6
LOC: 2006930862
published by 5 Story Walkup, LLC

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