The Last Days of Ray Cobb

Chapter 2

This book was a long time in the making. The first book came out in April 2012, the second April 2015. This one will land in your hands September 2022. Life altered a lot from when I first began writing it.

The political and social landscape has shifted since late 2015. The world changed. LA is no longer my home, though it holds a special place in my heart. A pandemic happened. My relationship with the story and the characters continued to shift and evolve. As my wife and I went through our own pregnancy story and loss, the tone deaf terror of what originally happened to Aelan and Imani had to be adjusted for my own personal reasons. Had I not made the rookie mistake of publishing a sample chapter of this book in The Last Dance of Low Seward, the pregnancy storyline may have disappeared altogether. But alas, I had already dug my proverbial grave and had to follow through. I think that’s why it took so long for me to complete.

On that note, I feel that I must be clear that this book does not have an anti-abortion or pro-life agenda. Women deserve to have complete rights over their bodies, choices, and futures. Access to safe, legal abortions prevent places like Solish’s clinic from taking advantage of women who feel they have no alternative. You don’t have to like abortion, but no matter your faith, you should acknowledge that women have the right to make their own choices about their bodies. It doesn’t matter what you “believe.” If that alienates you as a reader, I don’t give a s**t. I don’t want you in my club anyway, dickhead.

Then there was the matter of Ray’s backstory. After some initial Hollywood “buzz” on The Last Will and Testament of Ernie Politics, I had several TV executives give me the advice that we need to dig deep into what makes Ray tick and slowly reveal it over time. Dozens of versions were written and abandoned. I finally settled on hints of his former life rather than chapters explaining where he came from. If Ray’s former life finds its way into a different format in some unknown future, so be it. That’s why I wrote this as a book first and not a screenplay. But the meetings got me in my head and gave me the brain jumblies.

I didn’t want the entire book to be me revealing what motivated Ray just to say that I had done it. Recently I read a book by Jonah Lehrer called Mystery: A Seduction, A Strategy, A Solution. In it, he discusses the power of what literary critic Stephen Greenblatt called “strategic opacity.”1 Removing information actually makes the story better than explaining everything. We don’t need to know everything that happened to Hamlet or Othello or why the Mona Lisa smiles to enjoy what the art is in the moment. Not that I would ever deign to compare myself to Shakespeare or DaVinci, but it made me realize that explaining Ray’s origins and motivations in vivid detail did nothing to give the story more depth or make the reader feel more connected. Those details stole from the momentum of the story. Trying to explain away every choice made them less real.

Humans are flawed. We do strange things. Not all of them are motivated by a specific moment in our past. I’ve given you enough to know who he is as a man, but not so much that it stalled you from getting to The End. I hope your imagination filled in the gaps and no matter who I think Ray is, I hope you have a better version in your mind.

Thank you for taking this ten-year journey with me. Whatever book I write next, I hope it doesn’t take ten more years to get to you.

— Brad Grusnick. May 2022.

1. Jonah Lehrer, Mystery: A Seduction, A Strategy, A Solution. (New York, NY, Avid Reader Press, 2021), 111.