At the height of the first dotcom boom, when novices were becoming billionaires before lunch and all a girl had to do to be a sensation was take her clothes off now and then, a middle-aged man going through a painful, rancorous divorce gets involved with an Internet exhibitionist. A brilliant and ambitious exhibitionist, who’s determined to parlay her site into fame and an IPO -and who’s not above concocting a fictional life story to ensure getting the attention she wants.

And then the story and the life begin to knit together all too closely…

5.0 out of 5 stars Both Crafty and Devious,

January 9, 2012 By Steve Madden (Richland, WA USA)

I won a copy of Mr. Krever’s Mindbenders some months back, and enjoyed it so much I had to take a look at the rest of his catalogue. This one jumped out at me for the title alone (I have a habit of skimming blurbs to the point I’m often surprised at what the plot actually turns out to be). A few pages in, I knew this book would cement Mr. Krever’s place on my (in this case, virtual) bookshelf.

His writing is very natural, loose and easy, yet deep and thoughtful. I can tell he’s a man who has experienced life and not just lived it. The evidence is there in his prose.

I should caution the most prudish of people there is a fair amount of sexual material in the book, but it’s nothing explicit. Considering the backdrop of the story, it could have easily become that. Instead, Mr. Krever serves up an engaging character study. It’s a tale of a man who’s lost, looking for his way, and a girl who knows she is destined for great things and is determined to achieve it at all costs.

It’s a great read–enough to tear me away from my own edits for a time–and I look forward to Mr. Krever’s next book.

S.L. Madden

For an excerpt, click here.

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I’m not touching this one. I’m just formatting it and putting it up. It’ s a relic of a long-gone era. I explain metadata and goths, things that have long since become mainstream culture. The attitudeshere date to the primitive days of the Web and that’s all to the good.

The book is also very personal in the way it reflects the fears I went through during my divorce. Turning that trial (in every sense of the word) into a piece of wish-fulfillment was catharsis and a way of dealing with my fears about my ex and my son, about freedom, its benefits and terrors, about loneliness and being victimized or eaten up by it. Happily almost all of those fears ended up overblown but they made for a decent story.

What’s striking now is the portrait of an early version of celebrity culture – someone determined to become famous for being famous. Except this early version now seems entirely quaint and charmingly simple.

I started writing this book living at home with my wife and son. It’s a long time ago. I knew I was going to leave and I sat down to write a novel – I think it was part of my coming to grips with the idea. I wasn’t sure what to write about and I thought, ‘What have I never been comfortable writing about before?’ and the answer was ‘sex.’ So, as I said, a piece of wish-fulfillment for the middle-aged divorcee – the beautiful 23-year-old exhibitionist. Happily, as a storyteller, I’m not satisfied with wish-fulfillment. I insist on everyone getting what they deserve, particularly my own character. This book still carries one of my most inventive and fiendish examples of hoisting myself with my own petard.


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