Drunk Log
The latest book from Mark E. ScottDrunk Log: Guilt, Hope and Redemption Underpin Dark Comedy
Drunk Log is the story of Jack Current, a young engineer who has decided to end his life, but not until after a final bar crawl through his downtown Cincinnati neighborhood.
Accompanying him during his final hours is a dollar store notebook. The Drunk Log. In it he documents the evening, ruminates on his existence, and remembers his seven-year-old nephew, who died exactly a year earlier. It is a loss for which he feels responsible and for which neither he nor his family are willing to offer forgiveness. Unable to make amends or unburden himself of the oppressive guilt, Jack has come to the conclusion that jumping off a bridge into the Ohio River would make things easier for everyone.
Jack’s evening begins at his local watering hole, where a gregarious bartender named Aria, with whom he shares a mutual attraction, takes a surreptitious peek at Jack’s journal. Sensing Jack is headed to the same doom that claimed her sister, Aria decides to intervene.
Tracking him down in the middle of a winter storm, Aria and Jack finally meet on the freezing, snowy bridge, where an unexpected moment of baptism and rebirth brings them even closer together.
Can they emerge from their individual cocoons of loss and suffering, save each other, and rewrite their stories? This dark and hopeful comedy, which takes place from happy hour until midnight, is continued in Books Two and Three, as the unexpected, twisted saga of Jack and Aria unfolds over a combined period of twenty-four hours.
Drunk Log
Publisher: Speaking In Volumes, LLC
Release Date: February 2022
ISBN-978-1645405559
Available from Amazon.com
Book Reviews
Drunk Log
Mark Scott takes his readers on a harrowingly convincing descent
Mark Scott takes his readers on a harrowingly convincing descent into his anti-hero’s personal hell. As it turns out, the guy does have a reason to keep on living, but he doesn’t recognize her until, in any other world, it would have been too late. The story opens with one of the darkest moments in modern literature and proceeds through a bizarre series of near misses. If Cormac McCarthy were to write a love story, it might read something like this.
Mark Scott takes the reader on an inexorable path
In this highly engaging, tightly written book, portraying what could be the final night of a man tortured by a tragedy for which he feels ultimately responsible, Mark Scott takes the reader on an inexorable path, leading to what could be the end of his story or his moment to find redemption.
Scott explores past, present and future through keen observation
Haunted by the tragic death of his young nephew, due in part to his own carelessness, Jack, Drunk Log’s thirty-something protagonist, keeps a drink-by-drink, bar by bar diary of his spiraling, suicidal thoughts, addressing his guilt and roadblocks to finding love. Like Joyce in Ulysses, Scott explores past, present and future through keen observation and a deep but often darkly humorous internal monologue. It is an unconscious, self-deprecating cry for help that, initially unknown to Jack, does not go unheard.