Book details:
Fiction, Novella
Softcover • 136 pages • 5.5 in x 8.25 in
ISBN 978-1-7333864-8-7
About the Author:
Michael D. Meloan’s fiction has appeared in Wired, Huffington Post, Buzz, LA Weekly, Larry Flynt’s Chic, and in many anthologies. He was an interview subject in the documentaries Bukowski: Born Into This and Joe Frank: Somewhere Out There. With Joe Frank, he co-wrote a number of radio shows that aired across the National Public Radio syndicate. His Wired short story “The Cutting Edge” was optioned for film. And he co-authored the novel The Shroud with his brother Steven. For many years, he was a software engineer. In addition, he does killer karaoke. Read More…
1987 photo of Charles Bukowski and author Michael D. Meloan
Text excerpt from Pinball Wizard
Pinball wizard
by Michael D. Meloan
“Are you the Pinball Wizard or the pinball?” asks Ralph’s manager inside a nuclear hardened bunker in England. That is the question driving Michael D. Meloan’s new novella—a story of love, sex, jets, and Bukowski.
Lights flash and bells ring as Ralph is buffeted between a controlling father, international intrigue in the US defense industry, and a friendship with the writer Charles Bukowski. A wild girlfriend also ratchets-up the action.
But in the end, it is Ralph’s turn at the controls.
List Price: $15.00
Praises, Reviews & Interviews:
Michael Meloan on Cover to Cover with Mary Elizabeth Jackson
Pacific Book Review
September 10th, 2023
Writer and screen producer Michael D. Meloan here offers a sage, scintillating look at wide-open backstreet barrooms and well-guarded government hideouts, once upon a brilliantly imagined time.
Meloan’s central character, Ralph, is a computer whiz who has lucked into a government job working on top secret, nuclear initiatives. Though lacking a complete security clearance, his smarts make him highly sought after. For brief stints of release, there is his steamy, live-in relationship with the musically talented and very sexy Chrissie. The two discovered each other at a hang-out run by Linda, a woman attached to famed (and actual) writer and poet Charles Bukowski, who figures in the story.
Meloan’s deft melding of the realistic and the fantastic comprises one of the many glories of this winding tale. When someone asks Ralph if he is the “Pinball Wizard” – referencing the highly popular musical work of Pete Townshend and The Who – or merely the pinball itself, the crux of the novel is revealed, for Ralph is both – at times a brain-driven career aspirant determined to make his way upward, at other times a randomly bouncing object, with ideas and activities that take him far from the structured routine of his employment. As the plot develops, we see Ralph struggling to care for his now estranged parents: his father frail and ill but holding the reins of power through control of the family fortune – and his mother in the arms of another, believing that she has finally found true happiness. There’s a lot at stake for Ralph as he buffets back and forth from wild hippie haunts to nuclear bunkers, but Chrissie’s sensuous antics help him forget, for a time, all his inner conflicts. Then an order comes down from the government hierarchy: he must get Chrissie out of his life or lose his chance for a stellar career.
Meloan is a noted producer who has written frequently for various outlets, and was in fact a companion to, and interviewer of, the real Charles Bukowski and his spouse Linda. This careening, often raucous yarn – one could almost call it a parable – has sufficient sex, drugs and rock and roll to create an emotional ride, neatly contrasted with the computer world and its cold comforts. All the while, Ralph clings to visions of a higher purpose, to be sought, perhaps, in world wandering, – one could almost call it a pilgrimage. Readers may see themselves contemplating the same factors and hoping that Meloan is poised to create a sequel to this intriguing, amusing, and thought-evoking story.
By Barbara Bamberger Scott
Michael Meloan on The Douglas Coleman Show!
Listen to Michael Meloan on “The Weekend Radio Show with Ed Kalegi”
“My mailbox contained a surprise a week or so ago: Pinball Wizard, a novella by Michael Meloan. It is one of the most satisfying reading experiences I’ve had in recent years, in part because it handles a famous writer (Charles Bukowski) as one of its main characters with nonchalant deftness. Meloan’s slightly picaresque story is hard to classify, which is one of the things that makes it such a pleasure to read. He has a gift for writing unapologetically masculine prose; it’s flavorful without being exotic, and it doesn’t hurt that he has a fine ear for dialogue.”
“No one creates a sense of mood and place quite like Meloan. He’s staked out his own turf.”
“In the novel, “Pinball Wizard” is the code name of a top-secret military operation designed to help NATO fighter jets evade surface-to-air missiles from Eastern Bloc countries. This assignment presents software engineer Ralph Hargraves with life-changing decisions - which the #protagonist does not necessarily want to face.
No wonder: a closer look at his personal life reveals cracks, problems and conflicts on just about every level.
Admirable are the successful timing and content balance of the story: Meloan obviously uses existing know-how in dealing with programming languages, knows how to deal with technical and human details and skillfully weaves the facets of Hargraves’ existence together. It is even astonishing how easily such lush content has been packed into a novel of almost 130 or 112 pages.
A complex plot is joined by further flourishes such as the character comedy found in Hargrave’s colleagues, authentic and L.A.-typical descriptions.
Funnily enough, in this turbulent narrative network of impressions and scenes, top secret missions, various drugs and alcoholic beverages, and major emotional decisions, one no longer thinks of Charles Bukowski, who appears at the beginning of the novel, but by the end, his reappearance seems all the more worthwhile and successful.”
