When Little Rock-based Laissez Faire Books � or more specifically, publisher Kathleen Hiserodt � decided not to carry Vin Suprynowicz�s novel The Black Arrow, something didn�t make sense. The bookstore was well-known in America�s libertarian community for carrying a solid collection of literary work otherwise difficult to find. Suprynowicz�s Black Arrow seemed the ideal fit.
But Hiserodt had a problem with the book upon scanning the fifth chapter.
There he was, character Mayor Daniel Brackley, page after page coercing the poor Tanya Petrov into sex as she desperately consented, hoping to reduce her husband�s bogus jail sentence.
As he dragged his fingernails across the now-taut flesh of that wonderfully articulated, spread-out bivalve butt, he could tell from her little electric shiver that no one had ever done her this way before. Ah, the things he would teach her before they were through. In fact, if you look at it properly, these little adventures of his were really quite philanthropic in nature. Continuing the education of a deprived class of otherwise shut-in felons� wives and daughters.
�Here you�ve got a woman who read part of the book at least, hit some graphic sex scenes, maybe one, who knows how far she got in the book, and she has an emotional response,� Suprynowicz said. �She identifies with the character and I would imagine from her response she goes, �Oh shit, this is terrible. Tanya�s being treated like a slave; they�re showing no respect for her; she has no dignity; she�s been coerced and blackmailed into this behavior; this is terrible.��
Which raises a great question: Isn�t that what an author wants � a reader to have an emotional response? When a character is abused, you�d think most readers would want to know what happens next.
�You want to have that emotional response,� Suprynowicz continued. �It�s odd when you run into someone who says that�s bad.�
Unfortunately for Suprynowicz, that someone was Hiserodt, who refused to carry the book in her popular catalog. Or, rather, was it unfortunate?
According to the author, it wasn�t. As history has proven with great novelists like Henry Miller, blacklisting a book ignites interest and, of course, book sales.
Online, libertarian blogs criticized the decision. Sunni and the Conspirators (www.sunnimaravillosa.com/archives/00000297.html), for example, featured lengthy discussions on the matter. Even Hiserodt joined the debate.
�I am glad you found The Black Arrow inspiring,� she wrote. �Perhaps many others will as well. I would expect there are others, including myself, that find it offensive to have gratuitous vulgar sexual content thrown at them when they are expecting a novel about freedom. And I do believe our readers have such expectations in the fiction we carry. It is not a book I could recommend to anyone, despite many positive aspects of the book.�
Hiserodt has a right to carry what books she wants. A bigger issue involves others, who, like Hiserodt, think the job of fiction � especially if you�re a libertarian, or a religious group or political group with an agenda � is to be a one-on-one course with teenagers on how to explain a philosophy.
�So you look at that and you begin to see the fiction in it sucks,� Suprynowicz said. �Kathleen�s looking for books that are basically for teenagers where the characters give speeches, which are little lectures that the author wants to give. That kind of horseshit is a lecture disguised as dialogue.�
To Suprynowicz, a 55-year-old syndicated columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the job of a novelist in decent fiction is to trigger emotion. By detailing graphic sex and rape, his intention is to demonstrate what the characters are going through and create a common ground with the reader.
Andrew, the book�s hero, for example, struggles over two women. If he never had any kind of relationship that the reader could identify with, Suprynowicz believes that destroys what the book is about: sex and violence, freedom and fertility, rebellion and revenge.
"Maybe people think it�s just a made-up advertising copy or something, but to me, that�s what the book is about," Suprynowicz offered. "Of course you can debate about how graphic it should have been, which words you use, but I don�t think I write X-rated stuff. I mean, I don�t think that�s at all what it is. I certainly hope there�s more to the book than that."
However, according to Hiserodt�s interpretation of how a book is constructed, she feels that since the graphic sex ruined the book for her, it shouldn�t have been included, Suprynowicz said.
To him, writing a book can�t include an outlines. Scripting how characters evolve is fairly mechanical and a recipe for bad, structured fiction � for him, at least. By the time a writer reaches, say, chapter three, the writer looks at where the character is and where he needs to be by chapter�s end.
"So the writer picks them up and puts the marionettes on their strings and dances them along to get from here to there. Well, Pinocchio never comes to life," Suprynowicz said. "He�s always just a wooden puppet. You already wrote the outline."
Suprynowicz prefers to dream his books by capturing fragmented images that introduce themselves in an unconscious state. Then he hauls them back and hopes that they represent some kind of mythic narrative. He also trusts that they�ll have a structure that will make sense to people, beyond what he can immediately grasp.
"Why does Dracula last?" Suprynowicz asked. "It�s not really because anybody believes that guys come back from the dead. You can say, �Yeah there�s a metaphor,� but who knows whether the author sat down to build it as a metaphor. He�s trying to come up with a scary story to sell."
And that, Suprynowicz said, is what any author sets out to do. For Brom Stoker, he ended up writing a book about the sexuality of Victoria in London. When the count gets into the bedroom, pretty soon these girls are running around in the graveyard at night with their breasts heaving, looking for blood.
"It sounds like a metaphor for sexual awakening to me," Suprynowicz said. "But did he sit down and say, �OK, I�m gonna write a book about sexual awakening, but I�m gonna mask it in a certain way to where it�s acceptable to the Victorian public?� I doubt it."
It comes up that way because it comes from the subconscious, Suprynowicz said. It has the power to endure because people find things in it that are a little less obvious.
That�s the point of the scene with Mayor Daniel Brackley and Tanya Petrov. Suprynowicz denies he just sat down and inserted the scene in a manipulative way. For one thing, the images and scenes in the book came to him out of order, and he had to decide what order to put them in. He feels there�s more manipulation when involved authors use a structure to go back and forth with scenes.
"Yeah, there�s a little manipulation. It�s just figuring out what order to put them in," Suprynowicz said. "Tanya�s being extorted, giving sex to this guy. Putting that at the beginning of the book, should I have held it until later and built up to it? No, that�s just the way the book falls together. If you can�t take it, tough shit."
Fiction, at times, can be plagued with clich�s. With a kiss, the prince wakes up the princess while the whole kingdom is asleep. That�s the soft, yet popular literary market Suprynowicz must compete with � Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys-type material. He�s also competing with the violent and sexual fiction on television.
To be adopted in her catalog, Hiserodt suggests writers must commute back 60 years and pen books with nothing remotely offensive.
"It denies the ability to capture these dreams, haul them back and say, �Here�s the whole bang, just the way it came to me � rough,�" Suprynowicz said.
Hiserodt had problems with Suprynowicz�s sex scenes. She detailed that on Sunni Maravillosa�s blog, which for Suprynowicz proved helpful for sales. He�s sold 400-plus leather bound copies and more than 200 paperback. He figures he�ll sell out of the 5,000-copy run, something he didn�t anticipate until the fall, not a month after The Black Arrow�s April 15 release.
"I think we�re selling a lot more books because of that decision of hers," Suprynowicz said.
And once Hiserodt stated her reasons, Suprynowicz knew that would be the case.
Hiserodt�s explanation also shed light on Laissez Faire Books� catalog. She demonstrated frustration with books like Ayn Rand�s, whose work can be sexual in scenes, including one where a woman gets raped and enjoys it.
"Rand�s work sells well, but to Hiserodt, they were books already in Laissez Faire�s collection," Suprynowicz said. "When she said she might not list the book today, that was a clear indication � she�s made her catalog now a little more academic and to me a little more sterile."
Beyond Laissez Faire Books, Suprynowicz feels there�s a common notion that fiction is supposed to advance or teach some lesson. But such readers should understand that fiction can be more powerful than that.
Suprynowicz�s perception of Laissez Faire Books hasn�t changed. While disappointed, he still maintains the company�s catalog features some of the rarest libertarian material.
Publisher of Rational Review, Rational Review News Digest and Freedom News Daily, Thomas Knapp said Hiserodt is a business woman who made a business decision. But the decision brought bad press to her business.
"As far as bad press is concerned, it�s bad press for LFB and good press for the book," Knapp said. "The Black Arrow has received favorable reviews not just in the libertarian press, but across the spectrum � even Dave Lindorff of the hard-left CounterPunch likes it.
"The decision not to carry The Black Arrow pigeonholes LFB as a bit Puritan and perhaps too interested in dry academic/ideological texts. And it positions Vin�s book as the novel that was too hot for LFB to carry."
For Sunni Maravillosa, who operates blog Sunni and the Conspirators, she told Liberty Watch that it�s not Suprynowicz or even Laissez Faire Books that suffers.
"I think it�s unfair to LFB�s customers that they don�t have the opportunity to buy one of the best, most explicitly pro-freedom novels available from them," Maravillosa said. "As the head of LFB, she's got the right to make decisions on whatever basis she wants. That said, it was disappointing to learn that she'd rejected carrying The Black Arrow on what amounts to a personal distaste for some of its content, rather than for business-related reasons, such as the book isn't libertarian enough or she thought it wouldn't sell well."
The concept for The Black Arrow developed in a non-linear way. Suprynowicz comes up with a number of book ideas, and at any given time he�s starting work on three or four books.
The original conception was to create a city with complete gun control � gun control that�s fairly effective as no one has any guns and starting a revolution would be difficult. He thought back to the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 where the Jewish population used few guns to kill Ukranian guards to obtain more rifles.
So Suprynowicz thought, Wouldn�t it be interesting to defeat a sonic net that could pick up gunfire anywhere with silent weapons, going back to using bows and arrows and swords?
"That was the original conception," Suprynowicz admits. "But then you start immersing yourself in the plan for the book, and as I said, the book has to come out of a dream state. You�re lying in bed at night and it will come to you for the book, and you jump out of bed and you scribble it down, and you don�t know where it�s going. So I don�t write linearly. I don�t go, �Oh shit, I just finished chapter three now I have to write chapter four which is really a drag.�"
After a year thinking about the book, Suprynowicz spent about five months writing it. The Black Arrow is his third book, but his first work in becoming familiar with fiction.
One place readers are familiar with Suprynowicz is the R-J opinion page, where he�s been comfortable since 1991 penning material on constitutional freedoms.
To author Bill Branon, Suprynowicz has a quirky willingness to take on his most able critics face-to-face, giving them free ink and attention, "along with enough rope to properly hang themselves."
"Vin is a master intellect," Branon said. "His soaring virtue and value is as thinker and as reference for writers and readers alike, for any freedom fighter who is interested in accurate historical backup and sane extrapolation attendant to the sadly desperate war on jackboot logic."
While Suprynowicz enjoys the die-hard fans of his column, he�s aware of and content with his less-than-influential role, he said.
Newspapers as a whole, especially the R-J, have a lot of influence over local political races where no one knows anything about the candidates, Suprynowicz explained. If the paper endorses a judge or city council hopeful, it can have a lot of impact because not many people know much about those candidates.
Papers, however, have less and less impact as they climb the political scale.
"Nobody gives a shit who we endorse for governor or president. By in large, people have already made up their minds about that stuff and those candidates are spending millions of dollars, which swamps anything we could say in a 600-word editorial," Suprynowicz said. "If we tell people they ought to call the Sierra Club and tell them this is crap about their cancer lawsuit to stop the widening of U.S. 95, you are going to have some impact. If we tell the people that the United Nations is doing the wrong thing in Zimbabwe, who cares what the Review-Journal says?"
While columns like John Smith�s receive a lot of response, they do because Smith targets local issues with consistent follow-ups. But Suprynowicz, who writes about national issues like the 2nd Amendment and the War on Drugs, the impact level is nonexistent.
"I fight the good fight, but do not go into it assuming that I�m going to have a lot of impact," Suprynowicz concluded. "The reason that I�m a happy camper is that I�ve discovered years ago that if I write a 5,000-word piece that is damn good and explains an issue, I have two options: I can cut it or my editor can cut it.
"That doesn�t mean the piece is lost. I can store it and syndicate it later, or park it for when I write my next book."
