Family Dysfunction

Those Murderous Macbeths

Book cover adapted from Eugène Delacroix
“Hamlet and His Mother”, 1849, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Available in eBook, paperback, and hardcover

Family Dysfunction

Those Murderous Macbeths

A Titillating Family Tale of Rumor, Revenge, & Murder

Synopsis

Those Murderous Macbeths is a big, entertaining, contemporary novel that takes up space from the wide-open rolling hills of Idaho to the cloistered manses of Nantucket Island.

The Macbeths are the stars of the show. A crazy (literally), competitive, ambitious lot they are, and riddled with a wide array of psychological euphorias ranging from obsessive compulsive disorder to megalomania.

Present in our narrative, of course, are weddings, births, and deaths. The Big Three. Plus there are feuds galore and murders many, war and peace and no end of family love, harmony, hate, and distrust.

Money (what else?) causes no end of problems from way back when right up until the present day. It might even be said, if we took money out of the mix, that these Macbeths are actually a tight-knit clan with blood proving thicker than water. But this is America, after all, and so money is an essential ingredient in our narrative soup, and we all know the Almighty Greenback thins blood into a Niagara of want, greed, and deception.

The set-up for Those Murderous Macbeths is deliciously simple–a wedding invitation. Young Dane Macbeth wants to marry his penniless sweetie Ms. Melissa Brant at the First Congregational Church of Nantucket. No problem, right? A lovely young couple deeply in love wants to wed. Who could possibly object to such a celebration?

Well, the invitations go out, and lickety-split, you got it, all hell breaks loose.

The present-day narrative unfolds over just a few glorious summer days before, during, and after the wedding. But much of the novel unfurls in family flashbacks weeks, months, years, even generations in the past. It’s all leading up to the reception at the Nantucket Yacht Club and the bloody, murderous mess that will shortly thereafter ensue.

Those Murderous Macbeths is a colossal contemporary American novel—Big Characters, Big Themes, A Plot as Thick as Stew, Layer upon Layer of Subplot, A Rampaging Narrative laden with Slippery Language, and no end of Twists, Turns and Unpredictability.

Like Simpson’s literary masterwork, This Way Madness Lies, penned nearly a quarter of a century ago, Those Murderous Macbeths captures in its web the angst, the dread, and the sheer folly of the Modern American Family.

A consummate feast for lovers of big, bold, expressive fiction.

Author’s View

Way back in the late 80s, when I was still a young buck full of piss and vinegar, I had the unmitigated gall to see myself as a novelist. No reason at all for this vision other than pure ego. And then I doubled-down and actually wrote a damn novel. And lo & behold Jamie Raab of Warner Books bought, edited, and published the crazy thing to excellent critical acclaim and decent sales. The name of that novel was This Way Madness Lies, published in 1992, my 35th year on the planet, 25 years ago as of this writing.

This Way Madness Lies was a big, noisy, opinionated family novel based loosely on my own expansive and wild family.

Over the next ten years I wrote and published six more novels for Warner and Bantam on a wide range of subjects. But early in the new millennium I decided to have a go at the big sweeping family saga once again. Now fifteen years have quickly passed as I pen this author’s take on Thanksgiving weekend 2017. Those Murderous Macbeths has been hanging around my desk all this time. It has been written, rewritten, edited, reedited, and written again at least ten times. It has changed considerably and yet remained remarkably true to its original concept, that being one of the old adage that blood is thicker than water but maybe not quite as thick as money.

Money really is such a fucked up concept. It muddles the minds of even the finest men and women. It is a great destroyer of marital bliss and family harmony. But, well, it’s part of the human project, a great big chunk of a human life moving from birth to death, and so I suppose, like hemorrhoids and chicken pox and hysterical fools, it must be dealt with come hell or high water.

The characters in Those Murderous Macbeths all deal with the family bird shit dough in their own way. Me, I try to keep my attitudes to myself, not always with great success.

Those Murderous Macbeths does not have that raw, uncontrolled energy found in This Way Madness Lies, but it is the mature work of a far calmer and more objective mind, as well as a writer fully in control of his skills and talents.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing and editing it over all these years. It gives me great pleasure to finally see the story in print.

TWBSimpson/Sea Girt, NJ/11.24.17