BAN THIS BOOK By Robert W. Walker

What do I have to do to get banned? Is there a course I need to take? Is there a club or organization I must join? How vile, wicked, and evil do my books have to be? Damn but I’d loved to see any one of my 44 “odd” books fall under the black banner of Banned in the Bible Belt or Banned in Australia or New Zealand or Peoria, Illinois. If you want to help in this endeavor, to get my books banned you must first know the titles. Title is Psi Blue for my woo-woo paranormal mystery with a half Asian, half Celtic detective who “dabbles in Budhism and Wiccan” practices and can read objects handled by dead people. Gosh but we gotta ban this stuff!

OR you can ban hell out of Shadows in the White City if you prefer where all kinds of dark stuff including cannibalism happens in the black recesses of Chicago.
Come on, get on board with me and do what you can to ban me. Why? I’ll tell you why, because if anyone deserves getting banned it’s me!

Recently, a good friend and fellow author showed up for a well publicized book event at a local library, and there to meet her were a band of religious fanatics waving banners and signs and calling my friend a witch, a bitch, and a sorceress for having written a paranormal mystery and for living as a psychic investigator and lifelong learner. Frankly, many or most who ban books have not a single interest in reading any books save their one precious book. “Beware the man of one book” said Pascal, and I take Pascal at his word.

Once I was signed to give a speech in Broward County at the library to the Indian River Book Club. About a hundred people were expected. They sent bookplates so I could sign in peace and in anticipation. That might have been my first tip off. Folks who were not interested in hanging around long enough to get my signature. At any rate, after an initial excitement and anticipation of my coming to their club, I learn that no…on second thought, “Would you please NOT come?” Instead of paying me the agreed upon price to speak, they were willing to meet a kill fee. The kill fee was a thousand dollars. They paid me a thousand bucks to say nothing and to not show up.

Obviously, some one or two of them had taken time to read my book. B A N it!

What is most frustrating for me, the author, and authors in general, is that such things happen more frequently than people realize and it’s just not fair! I’d’ve done much better to have spoken and had the book legitimately BANNED, but to be paid off…wellllll, I can tell you it left me feeling rather in need of bathing. I was bought off instead of banned outright. I was cheated and left without the validation of being banned, without the novelist’s top prize, to join the ranks of Poe, Twain, Rushdie and so many esteemed authors whose books have been burned and or banned or both, the likes of say Ray Bradbury. Bradbury once said, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture, you just have to get people to stop reading them.”

At any rate if you call yourself friend—my friend—you will take up a standard, wave that flag and do all in your power to ban my current books for whatever cause you wish—call the books trash, call them Satanic with a capital S, call them the work of an insane mind, call them inspired my Marilyn Manson or Reba McIntyre, but get out and VOTE….get out and BAN them books. I need the notoriety now else am soon on the unemployment line, another place graced by greatness so often—certainly by Jack London at one time or another, if not the soup line. And yet Twain and such as Poe, while without funds at times, they never killed off one of their characters using the spine of a murdered man as the weapon. You get that? Murder by spinal column. A Walker special, not to mention the various dysfunctional families in Walker’s books that make the Soppranos look like the Pollyanas.

A BAN on me is a Vote for godliness! Ban Walker. Ban him to hell and back! Pull-lease!!

Robert W. Walker
www.myspace.com/robertwwalkerbooks
http://www.robertwwalkerbooks.com
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