Havoc

Author’s Note

Since reading it in the ninth grade I’ve believed Homer’s Odyssey is the archetype of today’s action thrillers, the one that set the standard for everything we have out there today. It has a hero who has to overcome staggering odds. It has exotic locals, fantastic chases, epic battles, and yes, even sex. While I chose not to copy Homer’s formula of a man trying to get home to his family (Would you really believe Mercer fighting to get back to his brownstone knowing only Harry and Drag were waiting to welcome him?), I wanted to pay homage to this masterpiece in my novel. I think once you know I slid in some references, and you’ve recently brushed up on your Homer, they’re fairly easy to spot.

A one-eyed giant of a man named Poli Feines is of course the Cyclops, Polyphemus. In The Odyssey, Odysseus escapes the monster using a bunch of sheep as cover, like the flock Mercer saved in Africa, and in the end does leave the Cyclops blinded. Calypso in The Odyssey becomes enamored of the hero, and at one point saves his life by supplying him with a girdle that buoyed him above the waves just before he drowned — a little like how Cali Stowe saved Mercer at the end of the book.

Others are certainly more obscure. One of Odysseus’s adventures found him caught between the Scilla and the Charybdis, which were a whirlpool and a sea monster. In my book it’s Mercer who’s caught between the Scilla River and a rebel general named Caribe Dayce. There are a few other references sprinkled throughout the novel and you might have fun finding them, or you might be like my wife and think I have too much time on my hands.

Speaking of time, the cipher Chester Bowie used to hide his message to Einstein based on Lewis Carroll’s doublets is a real word game, one I wasted too many hours playing. It’s actually a lot of fun when you can get them to work. Some of them include turning head into tail, ape into man, or four into five, or you can make up your own.

And on the subject of Chester Bowie, if you liked his theory about the monsters of Greek mythology being the bones of extinct animals, I highly recommend the book The First Fossil Hunters by Adrienne Mayor, which lays out a pretty good case for how some of these mythical creatures could have been devised.

I’d also like to clarify an intentional inaccuracy. Herb Morrison’s famed eyewitness account of the Hindenburg tragedy wasn’t broadcast over the radio — it was actually recorded to be the voice-over for a movie news company — but I wanted to include those immortal words in my prologue. Most everything else about the crash is true however. It was most likely water-repelling dope used to coat the airship that first caught fire from an engine spark and caused the catastrophe. Skenderbeg is a real person out of Albanian history who revolted against his former Ottoman masters. And scientists are still studying the natural nuclear reactors at Oklo, Gabon, only it is geologically impossible for any highly radioactive deposits to have survived to this day as they do in the book. Of course a natural reactor was geologically impossible until one was discovered in 1972.

And what of Alexander’s tomb? It still hasn’t been discovered. So who’s to say there isn’t something inside to explain how he managed to conquer so much of the ancient world?

Truth is always stranger than fiction.