Brian Kenneth Swain

Americans are positively infatuated with scoring in sports. I don’t mean scoring in the sense of keeping score, though goodness knows there exist more than a few hard-core fans who, not content to simply sit and watch a game, will, instead, labor over every pitch, hit, throw, and error that occurs, writing each down in arcane hieroglyphics on score-sheets, for what possible use afterward one is hard-pressed to imagine. I’m talking here, though, about our national obsession with seeing the score of each sporting contest rise to as high a level as possible. There is something ingrained in our psyche that not only fuels the need for clearly defined winners and losers, but also demands that the actual productive output of each event be ...

If you doubt that the Jewish people would ever attempt something so audacious as replacing the Dome with the Temple, you need to know that some Jewish people are already planning for it. John Hagee – Gorenberg, pg. 177 The purpose of an introductory essay is, primarily, to establish context for the work that follows. To a lesser degree, it is, if candidly written, a means of obtaining insight into the mind of the writer, specifically why he undertook the story in the first place, and what personal characteristics inform his research and writing. That said, let’s dispatch the latter objective first, as it is the easier of the two. My gut reaction is to state here, for the record, that I am atheist. It’s what the Sam Harris’s and ...

Just finished drafting Chapter Eight, in which we meet the Imam Bachir Tarraf, brother of Hanan Tarraf, the father of Khalid, the young man who killed himself and seventeen others in a suicide bombing in Chapter One. Bachir will play a pivotal, but as yet undetermined, role in the conspiracy that is starting to shape up in the story. In this introduction, we learn that he is haunted by his memories of the 1982 massacres at the East Beirut camps at Sabra and Shatila, during which time he served as Imam of the mosque in the camps. Hundreds (some say thousands) of refugees were massacred on the night of September 16th, and he was spared only because of his position. He will be a fun character to play around with, particularly as regards his ...

World Hunger Brian Kenneth Swain (210) 464-2412 Bswain2000@yahoo.com WGA Reg. # VSHA7D9D5AC7 Two brilliant molecular biologists and a greedy corporate chieftain undertake a bold technological experiment to revolutionize global agriculture, but instead drive it to the brink of destruction. ———————————- The story begins at the end. Philip Barett, senior scientist for Vanguard, the world’s largest life sciences company, testifies before a senate subcommittee concerning the calamitous events that resulted from Vanguard’s efforts to revolutionize world agriculture with a genetically modified (GM) technology known as Evergreen. Robert Chase, Vanguard’s greedy, abusive, and ...

After a lengthy absence from novel writing (though I have made some progress in doing another careful copy edit of “World Hunger” for a coming re-release), I am back hard at work on research and drafting for “Days End,” my story about a dirty bomb attack on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The book is about three families–Jewish, Muslim, and Christian–and their coming together (some for better, some for worse) in a plot to sabotage the mount against all future use. Just finished drafting Chapter Nine, in which an Irish detective interviews the Director of St. John’s Cancer Treatment Center concerning the theft of nearly a kilogram of Cesium 137 from their radiation therapy storage facility (used for ...

Just discovered that I have a poem in the Winter 2011 edition of The Northwest College Review. Check it out at http://issuu.com/lorigreig/docs/northwest_review_4-11b. The poem is entitled “Don’t Make Me Stop This ...

“I shouldn’t have thought you’d be all that keen to visit a place like this, Buster, I mean what with your lofty new status and all. That was quite a piece on the news the other night.” Alvin Cressey stood adjacent the passenger door of his Mercury Marquis, right hand resting on the upper window frame, waiting patiently as Buster Cranston slowly, methodically thrust his legs to the ground and lifted his ancient frame from the seat and into a more or less vertical position. The Marquis, a nondescript burgundy 2004 model four-door, was Cressey’s “everyday” car, the one he used when meeting or chauffeuring members of his congregation who were less than comfortable with the notion of a Protestant minister owning any of the ...

Excerpt from Alone in the Light Imagine going to class one morning—October 18, 1994, to be specific—and returning to your dormitory room to find your roommates gathered around the television watching reports of a surprise air assault on your home town. These people—your roommates, your friends—are Russians, and they laugh and joke about how that will teach those Chechen terrorist bastards. That will teach them some respect. And only after you have stood silently in the doorway for a minute or so do they turn and see you, their Chechen friend. And how quiet the room becomes at that awkward moment. But imagine if they had known what town you actually came from? Imagine if, as they silently left your room, they had known that ...

In Chechnya, a terrible mistake costs a brilliant young engineer his family. In Istanbul, an oil tanker on its maiden voyage sinks for no apparent reason. In Moscow, an astonishing new weapon threatens to upset the balance of world power. And in Sochi, a cutting-edge energy facility opens for business. Movlady Saidov is a young man struggling to navigate a tightrope between rage and love, embroiled in a complex web of conspiracy only partly of his own making. His story is fiction, but the technology, the politics, and the tension are as real as the headlines of yesterday’s newspaper. This is Swain’s most compelling thriller yet, drawing together the seemingly unrelated worlds of cryogenic fuel technology and directed energy weaponry ...

Finally got the cover art situation straightened out for the new novel and I should receive final draft cover and text block in the next few days for review and approval. Looking forward to getting this one “in the can” so I can move on to the next ...