Shimmer
by Eric Barnes
288 pages, Hardcover
List Price: $25.95
Published in 2009
ISBN-10: 1-932961-67-4
Unbridled Books

Thanks to Libby for my review copy. This book is out on the shelves today, June 30.

My Take:
I like the premise of this book. When I started reading, it’s very hard to stop. The narrative and the dialog is captivating. Just to illustrate how captivating: My husband was playing with Star Craft on his computer; it’s an addiction of his. When I like a book, I tend to read aloud passages or paragraphs that I enjoy. I was reading about Robbie Case, how he came to be. He turned down his game volume while I was reading about Robbie, but he turned it off by the time I got to Trevor. Then he had me read aloud up to 75 pages. It was 2AM, and we’d gotten sleepy.

I supposed Eric Barnes is like Dan Brown, Jonathan Kellerman, and Joseph Finder. This book is edgy, exciting and thoughtful. It does a great job of keeping my interest so that I carry it around with me until I finished.

About the book:

In just three years, CEO Robbie Case has grown Core Communications, a data technology company, from 30 people to over 5,000. Now a $20 billion company made legendary by its sudden success, Core is based on a technology no other company can come close to copying, a revolutionary breakthrough known as drawing blood from a mainframe. And Robbie, its 35-year-old CEO, is acclaimed worldwide for his vision, leadership and wealth.

Except that all of it is based on a lie.

The technology doesn’t work, the finances are built on a Ponzi scheme of stock sales and shell corporations, and Robbie is struggling to keep the company alive, to protect the friends who work for him and all that they ve built. Each day, Robbie tries to push the catastrophe back a little further, while his employees believe that they are all moving closer to grace, the day their stock options vest, when they will be made rich for their faith and loyalty and hard work. The details of the lie are all keyed into a shadowy interface that Robbie calls Shimmer, an omniscient mainframe that hides itself, calculates its own collapse, threatens to outsmart its creator and to reveal the corporation’s illegal, fragile underpinnings.

Shimmer is the story of a high-tech crusade nearing its end. The shell game Robbie has created is finally running out of room. And Robbie is the only one who knows. And he’s the only one who has a chance to make things right. You can read the long version here.

About the author (straight from his website):
Eric Barnes is the writer of the novel, Shimmer (Unbridled Books, July 2009). Eric has been writing fiction for many years and published a number of short stories before finding a home for Shimmer at Unbridled.

He is the publisher of The Daily News and The Memphis News, two local publications covering business and politics in Memphis. Eric was once COO (and, before that, Publisher and Managing Editor) of Towery Publishing, a publisher of city guides, books, maps, city sites and business directories for cities around the country. Towery went under in 2003, a sad and endless and unforgettable experience that culminated in the purchase of a few cases of beer for the remaining staff at one final staff meeting at Union and Mclean.

Prior to that, Eric was managing editor of a business magazine in New York City, which was in the midst a transtion from what’s known as a “business opportunities” magazine to a legitimate business magazine. Business opportunities magazines run ads for get rich quick schemes and, it seems now, those ads were an influence on the much bigger schemes in Shimmer. Read more…

Q&A:
“What question have you always wanted to be asked in an interview but never have been?”

What worries you the most, as the book is starting to hit the bookshelves?

“What is your answer to that question?”

That readers will have expectations of the book that the book isn’t meant to fulfill. Much of this is about all the stories of Ponzi schemes and fraud that’s been in the news. I worry people will compare Shimmer to the Madoff fraud or the Allen Stanford (alleged) fraud. It’s understandable and inevitable that people would, so it’s not that I fault anyone for having their expectations influenced by such big events. Even the marketing of the book, something as simple as the jacket copy or the jacket itself, those things too create expectations in a reader. But somehow, as the writer of the book − not a person trying to sell or market it, but a person who just hopes people read the book and like the book − for me I hope the book gets read for what it is, read only in the context of the words that actually are on the page.

“Why did you pick the genre you write in?”

I don’t think I ever picked how I write. It’s more, for me, about the voice in my head. I’m not sure I know where that voice came from. Maybe I don’t even want to know where it came from. But I started to write because, somewhere in my mind, there was a story and a voice and a fundamental thing that I wanted to say and that I thought people would want to read.

I’ve written in a variety of different voices or styles, now that I look back on it. Many of the first stories I published were in a much darker, more barren, even sometimes violent style. But that changed over time so that, while Shimmer is still often fairly dark, it’s also sometimes funny. There are light moments. And, certainly, it’s a book without violence, in style or content.

That said, to some degree, I’ve always been influenced by, or even tried to emulate, writers I like, particularly Don Delillo and Cormac McCarthy. And yet I don’t think I ever particularly sound like the writers that have most influenced me. Shimmer certainly doesn’t sound anything like Cormac McCarthy and similarities to Delillo are, maybe, there. Maybe. And so it really comes back to the unexplained voices in my head.

“What kind of research did you do for this book?”

I did very little research, in all honesty. I was working in a technology company when I wrote the first draft of Shimmer, which was during the dot com boom. For the most part, I didn’t need research time, I just needed time to think about and absorb all the information that I dealt with at work, that I read about and learned about as part of my job. Instead of researching, I was spending time reimagining all that information − ideas about technology, about business, about financing and building (and tearing down) a company.

However, I did do a few spreadsheets about the company’s finances and its technology, mostly to double-check my math on the way the Ponzi scheme would work. As I wrote, I knew how I wanted the scheme to work. How it would feel. What it’s essential rhythm would be. But I needed to do the math on the actual details of the pricing of the machines and the rate at which the company was spending money faster than was sustainable.

“What’s been the hardest thing for you when writing your books?”

These are great questions, by the way.

For a long time, the hardest thing was rejection. I was writing and getting rejected but still writing, late at night and early in the morning. I’ve blogged about this in painful detail on my own site, but the gist is that Shimmer is the fourth manuscript I wrote. And so writing, which is truly the hardest work I’ve ever done, the most tiring and draining work, writing while having manuscripts rejected was difficult. It’s impossible not to question whether this, writing, would ever work out. I was getting stories published, which gave me enough sense of success that I could keep working on the novels. It’s not that I ever thought I would not write. But it was wearing, deeply wearing, to be at a point where it wasn’t clear the novels I was writing would actually be read.

I’ve always wonder if authors have a routine. “When and where do you write? Do you have particular time of day you find you’re more creative”

I definitely have a routine. I write in the early morning, when it’s still quiet and when, for the most part, my day isn’t yet filling up with distractions. I need to write every day, day after day, in order to really be productive. I can’t write just every once in a while. I need the repetition, the constancy of being at my desk, day after day.

The reality is that, sometimes, there isn’t time to write. So, for me, I don’t try to write if I know I’m not going to have time, day after day. I have to give myself a break from writing if I know that routine isn’t going to be possible.

“What authors do you read when you’re not busy being an author yourself?”

My favorite authors are McCarthy, Delillo, Nabokov, Hemingway. But I also like to read non-fiction, particularly books by David Quammen, who writes about ecology, science, Darwinism and all kinds of unrelated things. There’s something very satisfying in reading books that are not at all like anything I write.

“What’s the best thing about being an author?”

Writing. I love to write. It’s tiring and exhausting, but to actually complete something that you like, that works, that you know is right, that’s one of the greatest feelings in the world.

“What question would you like your readers to answer?”

What was their favorite part of the book that was mostly if not entirely unrelated to the main plot, the lie? Was their an incidental character or moment they enjoyed most.

Giveaway:
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One winner will be drawn on July 18 and posted after that.

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Tags: Eric Barnes