A Head and Heart in Good Proportion, excerpt
Some stories start slow, but not "The Calling of Jujubee Forthright", Scott Philip Stewart's new novel--a modern-day rendering of the Parable of the Pharisee and the Sinner in a Georgia setting.
Stewart's delightfully improbable characters from Medlyn, Georgia, begin with the narrator, David (a.k.a. "Diogenes" or "Dewey") Hazelriggs, a depressed philosophy professor, self-proclaimed cynic, driver of a '62
Big Healy 3000, and author of his "hymn to misery" ironically named Honest to God. He meets his counterpoint in five-foot, 300-pound auctioneer Jimmy Jack B. ("Jujubee") Forthright, who has a prosthetic leg and a fresh calling from Jesus Christ to auction off salvation to the lowest bidder. Mutual friend Fanny Fuller introduces them when she shows Diogenes her most recent auction acquisition, a giant prophetic lawn gnome. If you don't believe it's prophetic, just peek at in under the shadow of Fanny's shawl. It's eyes glow; they really do--and all that within the first 13 pages...
published in Agape Press,
June 22, 2006.
Stewart's delightfully improbable characters from Medlyn, Georgia, begin with the narrator, David (a.k.a. "Diogenes" or "Dewey") Hazelriggs, a depressed philosophy professor, self-proclaimed cynic, driver of a '62
Big Healy 3000, and author of his "hymn to misery" ironically named Honest to God. He meets his counterpoint in five-foot, 300-pound auctioneer Jimmy Jack B. ("Jujubee") Forthright, who has a prosthetic leg and a fresh calling from Jesus Christ to auction off salvation to the lowest bidder. Mutual friend Fanny Fuller introduces them when she shows Diogenes her most recent auction acquisition, a giant prophetic lawn gnome. If you don't believe it's prophetic, just peek at in under the shadow of Fanny's shawl. It's eyes glow; they really do--and all that within the first 13 pages...
published in Agape Press,
June 22, 2006.