Dark / Drama / Thriller
Date Published: July 28, 2023
Publisher: Troubadour Books
“Love before Covid - A raw, philosophical dive into love’s
messy reality—unflinching, dark, and unapologetically human. Unlike
typical romance novels, LOVE BEFORE COVID is a dialogue-driven exploration
of human flaws and ideologies, blending fiction with metaphysical inquiry.
It’s not about comfort; it’s about confrontation and
insight.”
Laced with dark humour, it is best described as traumatic (sur)realism.
Love Before Covid takes the reader on a journey through the mind of Joe
Pastorius - jazz fan, poet, and victim of horrendous sexual and emotional
abuse at the hands of his mother.
The real-time dialogues between the characters that emerge from Joe’s
unconscious come via arguably corrupted memories and dystopian dreams. They
tell us more about Joe than he could ever know, and perhaps more about our
world than you could ever imagine.
Dialogues entail an exploration of clashing perspectives and opinions, that
cause reflection. Today though, our world has been infiltrated by online
dialogues that tend to feel like wild unfiltered streams of human thought,
raw, chaotic and often polarising and devoid of much reflection. Arguably
that attitude, and lack of reflection is mirrored by the characters you will
encounter. The reflection comes from the reader as the situations unfold.
Your moral boundaries will without doubt be pushed to the limit.
You will meet an altruist who can’t stand up for himself, a charming
but violent public intellectual, a beautiful dancer who hates fat people, a
flirty and gregarious bartender who will do anything to get pregnant, a
traumatised art historian who never wants to be a mother, a successful
intellectual Mexican writer who is secretly disapproving of her childhood
friend’s career as a pornstar, the teenage genius son of that pornstar
who has sexual fantasises about his mother, a woman who is pressured into
cutting off her penis and a successful therapist who has a habit of ruining
people’s lives.
And yes, before you ask, some of the characters in this book eventually
catch Covid 19. However, there is always hope. For Joe Pastorious, that
comes in the form of the psychopath named Janet Waverley.