William Ferraiolo, Author, Visits! ... And Spotlighting His Latest, The Pope of Atlantis...

 

Welcome to Book Readers Heaven William! I'm so happy to have you visit here! But I'm also happy to have first connected through your book, The Ethical Assassin which as you know, set my mind adrift on what genre the book was...LOL 

And I do have the normal question as to how you came to write this story. A personal interest? An exploration of the mind of a killer?

The Ethical Assassin: A Vigilante's Memoir is my attempt to explore the mind and actions of a man who believes that he has nothing left to lose, apart from the possibility of God's punishment. He decides to kill evil people who has escaped man's punishment, or who have met with punishment that he regards as insufficient. There are three books in that series. Only the first has been published. He struggles constantly with the moral question of whether he is or is not morally justified in his executions of child molesters, murderers, and others who damage that most innocent among us.

Before getting into our discussion further, could you tell us a little about yourself...

My personal history is not particularly interesting. I was raised in an Italian, Catholic family, and I was baptized and confirmed, but I cannot say that I currently subscribe to Catholicism. Having destroyed my knee in my senior year in high school and lost my scholarship to college, I had to chart a new path and ended up, somehow, majoring in philosophy. After graduate school, I took a job in Stockton, California in 1997, and I taught there for 25 years before taking a somewhat early retirement. While I was still teaching I wrote a number of books about Stoicism. Those can be found on my Amazon author page. After I retired, I began writing fiction. We'll see how it goes.

Now, let's go on to my favorite of the two books, and which, in my opinion, is a very special book for a number of reasons... When I discovered what your book, The Pope of Atlantis was really about, which for purposes of this discussion to ensure we don't give away anything major from the book, was based upon religion... And, in particular, the end of the world... I also began to consider your book in light of today's world...

So, I still use the first question that I normally ask: Why did you, William, write The Pope of Atlantis? 

The Pope of Atlantis is an exploration of a man cursed to walk the Earth for thousands of years because he offended his Creator. He lives for centuries in a condition of rage and rebellion against God's commands, and this leads him to commit many atrocities. He is a lonely outcast everywhere he goes, but he has brief contacts with various historical figures. God breathes new life into this cursed man's despair by allowing him, once again, to hear his Creator's voice. With the hope that his curse might eventually be lifted, the protagonist of the novel tries his best to live the remainder of his life in a manner that is pleasing to the Lord. 

With the great cataclysm that opens the novel, this man realizes that his curse, and the world, could be coming to an end. He makes his way to one of the two camps in which there are a few survivors and tries to tell them his story. Of course, they do not believe him at first. I intentionally left their attitude about his story ambiguous until the very end. Do they have the faith to repent, and do they have the time to be saved through faith or deeds? I also wrote Pope because Cain's death is not mentioned in the Bible, and I thought it would be interesting, as the writer and readers, to explore the story of a man cursed to walk the earth until the end of time. I'm happy you enjoyed it!

For instance, Cain explains to Mike that he believes that the first books of the Bible are definitely written correctly, even arguing because the others can't see how the world could be created in a week... Now, yes, Cain, in your book, did not live much longer than that period, but it obviously raises the question as to whether you, too, believe that the Bible is the Word of God? 

As for the historicity of Genesis, I am convinced that the author(s) believed that the account offered is literally, historically accurate. Whether the account actually is accurate is, of course, a controversial matter. Part of the Genesis account mentions the protagonist of Pope. His death, however, is not mentioned. So, I thought it would be interesting to construct a narrative of one possible series of events that could link this cursed man from very near the Creation to The Last Day. 

Along the way, this man is repeatedly compelled to witness unfathomable human suffering as part of his punishment. He sees war, famine, genocide, and all of the rest of the things that humans do to each other, as well as the suffering cause by nature as it groans under the weight of sin. The world, it seems to me, is still groaning. We are all still witnessing the consequences of sin. Humans are the sinning species.

As for my own religious commitments, I believe in the God of Abraham, but beyond that, I remain uncertain. Whether the Jews, the Christians, or the Muslims have the correct account of the nature of God and His relationship to humanity is not clear to me. It is, of course, possible that they are all wrong, and that God does not exist. From my perspective, the fine-tuning argument persuades me that God probably does exist, and Rabbi Keleman's argument that the Sinai revelation almost certainly could not have successfully been concocted and marketed to the descendants of those who allegedly heard God speak in an audible voice, convinces me that God really did speak at Sinai (an event that lifts the protagonist of The Pope of Atlantis out of the depths of his despair).

My point is not to argue, but rather, that I personally have allowed myself to read beyond what I was taught in a particular church, have come to question the validity that God spoke all these words to the writers, as He did Moses, which was specifically spotlighted... For me, I simply acknowledge that I call myself a Thomas--a doubting Thomas who keeps my mind open for what God really did and said...and keep learning...

Consider this, just as you took license as a writer to create a fictional story, could you imagine that the original writers of the entire Bible could not have done the same?

Given that the world ends in your book, can you share a little about your thoughts in relation to today?

I don't know the future any better than anyone else, but I am not particularly optimistic. Currently political and social phenomena are, to my way of thinking, downstream from the "fallen" sinful nature of humanity. People cause themselves trouble. It's what we do best. Whether it's Noah's flood, or Egypt, or Rome, or the USSR, or any other socio-political configuration...it goes wrong. People suffer. People die. There is nothing truly new under the sun. God offered humanity the choice of obedience and life, or disobedience followed by suffering and death. Either that...or we're on our own.

Well, I personally believe there was an additional step. God gave His Son to the world and offered His Love. He also gave us free will and only asked in return for us to place the loving God first in our lives and to love our fellow man. Many of us are living as a follower of Jesus, knowing what that means and choosing our way of life based upon the recognition that all men are created as equal (by God) and should be treated in Love as God has directed. Millions of us are doing that daily. Some chose a different path... But none are ever on our own unless we choose to be...

Where do you see your writing headed in the future?

I write about our struggle to figure out what to do with our lives, and about our struggle to do the right thing in difficult circumstances...like the sudden loss of everything that one of us ever cared about, or a global cataclysm that destroys over 8 billion human lives and leaves the survivors with no idea what just happened, what (if anything) it means, or how to survive. What makes the morally good things good, and the evil things evil, and...how can we tell the former from the latter when we encounter devastation? These are the questions that fascinate me. Hopefully, I will find readers who feel the same way.

Time will tell.

William Ferraiolo

Thanks so much for visiting and talking about your fiction writing! Best wishes for your future!

GABixlerReviews

The Ethical Assassin: A Vigilante's Memoir by William Ferraiolo - A Philosophic Debate Presentation - Not A Novel

 Can the sudden deprivation of normalcy lead to similar symptoms as the sudden loss of blood and oxygen to the brain? Blood was lost, to be sure, but it was not lost from my body. It was all of the other blood that mattered to me that drained away far too quickly for me to be able to process what had happened. People disappeared from my life in, from my perspective, an instant.

There is always more to every story than the part that gets told or written down.

In any case, I have no idea how to characterize the change within my own psyche at the moment I heard the news, nor do I know what to say about my state of mind all these years later when I consider everything that happened on that day and the days immediately following. I know that things have changed over the years between that day and this one, dramatically from my point of view. Exactly how and when these changes took place is not particularly interesting to me. My life now is almost nothing like my life before I received the phone call. Everything about which I once cared so deeply was simply taken from me at that moment. It did not all disappear a little bit at a time, in a manner that allowed me to adjust gradually. What I thought of as my entire life just “went away” all at once. I “had it all,” and then I had nothing, as far as I was concerned. What would that do to any man? It played a central role, I am fairly confident, in turning me into a killer. Of that, I am almost grateful on some occasions. At other times, it feels like a corollary injustice or, at the very least, an additional facet of the crushing misfortune of losing my family. If my wife and kids were still alive, then I would probably not endanger them by doing the things I have done since I lost them. As things stand, they are in no danger. They are safely dead. I cannot speak for any man other than myself regarding the impact of this type of event. The phone call whereby I learned that my family had all died at once left me feeling like I was suspended in mid-air. 

I felt like a cartoon character who has run off of a cliff, but not yet fallen because he has just looked down. In the Road Runner cartoons, gravity only takes effect when the character looks down to see that he is now standing on nothing. Like Wile E. Coyote, I experienced that instant when I realized that the ground had dropped away and there was now nothing but the abyss beneath my feet. I felt the abyss yawning beneath me, but there was no experience of plummeting to the ground. Feeling as if I had touched something beneath me might have been comforting. I felt absolutely nothing beneath me or supporting my body. I just “hung there,” suspended above the nothingness where my family had been. Plummeting into the abyss and finally hitting something would have been preferable, I think. That would have felt like something, at least. The coyote in the cartoons falls, crashes, makes sounds like an accordion, re-establishes bodily integrity, as if by magic, and then goes back about the business of trying to chase down the Road Runner. He still has the same purpose he always had. He recovers quickly. Cartoon characters can do that. The coyote still knows what he is supposed to do. His purpose is written for him. He has a script, after all. Wile E. Coyote exists only for the sake of chasing the Road Runner. All of his efforts serve that endeavor. He is lucky that way. I envy him in that way. His “character” is fixed by the script in which he exists. He has no need to try to make sense of his life. He does not struggle to find a meaning for his existence. Everything is quite obvious for Wile E. Coyote. It must be nice to be a cartoon character existing within the confines of a script in which nobody ever really dies. After the crash in my life, there was no obvious purpose for me to pursue. Nobody showed me a script...

There were, to be sure, things that had to be done. Funerals do not organize themselves, after all. I have vague and indistinct memories of phone calls, visits from people who “wanted to help,” but who also knew that there was nothing really that they could do about anything other than helping to handle trivial formalities and fairly meaningless rituals. The relevant rituals are intended to be comforting, I suppose. Those rituals are also more lucrative than is decent, are they not? The sickness and death industries are the most reliable sectors of any economy, I suppose. People die more consistently than they do just about anything else. The old quip about “death and taxes” is no joke. The death part is a certainty indeed. When the caskets have to be closed for an entire family, then the whole affair is somewhat less comforting, I think. People just show up to “pay their respects” to boxes with photographs standing next to them on easels. They do this because they have been taught that they are supposed to do this. I did not need them to show up. Frankly, I would have preferred to dispense with the whole funeral. Of course, I have also been taught what one is supposed to do in such cases. There are cultural customs that must be observed, for reasons I simply do not understand. Why can we not leave the dead alone, for God’s sake? No family member wants to attend the funeral and perform the rituals. In any case, I hope nobody wants that. There is something positively ghoulish about a funeral. The show, however, must go on, I guess. There can be no dispute about whether the dead people are truly gone when the caskets are closed. Nothing says “gone” quite like a closed box, a photograph, and an expressionless erstwhile husband and father who has just ceased to be anything that matters to him anymore. My wife and children were not present at the funeral. Their mangled bodies were in those boxes, as far as I was aware anyway. A mangled, lifeless body cannot be my wife or child. My family was composed of living people. Those living people did not show up at the funeral. Where that left me was entirely unclear. What is a middle-aged man who, suddenly, no longer has a wife or children? Is there even a word for that? Children who lose their parents are orphans. A parent who loses his children is nothing-in-particular. There is, to the best of my knowledge, no word for that in the English language. I think I probably still am a nothing-in-particular, in many respects. No term is necessary, I guess. A husband who loses his wife is a widower, but he is no longer a husband, is he? What the hell is a husband the moment his wife dies? When, exactly, does he stop being a husband? This is an interesting question that makes precisely no difference at the moment it arises in a man’s life. No man wonders, at the funeral, “am I still married, or am I now a bachelor?” as he stares at a casket. Well, I hope no man wonders about such matters at that moment. Who the hell knows what other people may or may not think about at any given time? Frankly, I do not care.

~~~

If I can ponder semantics and motives at the funeral, then I guess other men can wonder if they are still husbands. There is something ludicrous about all of this, is there not?

In less than 20 of the 137 pages pages, I had already questiond the premise of this book. It is supposedly an anonymous memoir that was found by a server at a diner when he had finished his meal and left his money on the table...with the book I just finished reading...

Normally, I would play along with the author who chooses to create such a scenario. But the writing prevented me. I immediately did a bio search for the author of the book and discovered that what I had felt about the book was correct. I believe this might be the first fiction book written by the author... He has a number of nonfiction books available as well.While it is an interesting book, and certainly is fiction, I don't consider it a novel...

I took a course in university level philosophy many years ago... The one thing I remember was a question: If a tree falls in the deep forest where nobody lived, can it be heard... Of course, I said "Yes." Let's face it, there are many things in this world we live in about which we know nothing... On the other hand, I have personally heard and seen a tree fall in my 13 acres of forest, so even if other trees fall that I do not hear, I am confident that it can be heard, if somebody who could hear, such as an animal, was nearby... I decided that I wasn't interested in any further study of philosophy even though I had received an A in the course...

I decided to share this information because, if you choose to read this book, you will immediately realize that it is not a normally written book. The author claims that he can't write, yet proceeds on writing almost ad nauseam... Yes, that means there is much repetition, much more than the normal fiction novel. One phrase in particular, for example, is "Time Will Tell..." It is used throughout the book as a, perhaps, closing to a paragraph (?). Or is it to request that the reader pay attention to his arguments?

For that is exactly what the book is about... It is a beginning (stated to be a trilogy) of the story of a man who has become an Assassin after his entire family was killed in a car accident. After I realized that the author taught philosophy in higher education, I was interested enough to read the book--I don't call it a novel; in fact, it defies genre identification in my own experience...Except maybe as a nonfiction book of philosophical debate on important issues... The one and only character who talks is obviously biased related to facts...

That is not to say that the book itself was not interesting, but my first thought about any book is what is the author trying to tell us? I knew immediately that he did not know how to write a novel, even if he had written nonfiction. The writing is indeed different... But, as I read, I felt like the author had much to talk about... Or, even better, wonder, about...

Several times while reading I thought of this book. Although I had never taken the time to read it, by the time it came out, I was fairly certain what it would say, LOL But there were several issues that came to light in this book that were, shall I say, surprising?

First of all, there is little attention to an overall concept of the book except maybe chronologically. However, it is very clear that the man who became an assassin, even though he loved his wife(?) that he also blamed his wife for his losing his entire family...Notice that the entire book is from a man's point of view...

Let's explore how the accident happened. His wife became squeamish when an animal had been killed on the road, so much so that she didn't want to run over it and automatically swerved. This resulted in her driving off the road and down a hillside. Now, the husband knew about her problem... He had chastized her over and over about what could happen by her swerving... Readers, not once in this book did the husband ask her why it so upset her, or even offer that she get help in getting over this obsession. Now, me, a woman, immediately thought that she might have had a special animal in her early life who was beloved as well as loving to her when she greatly needed it... And, taking it a step further, she immdiately had a flashback of having that animal accidentally killed as she watched...and, for just a second was back in her childhood... Readers don't know, do we? But what I determined by the end of this book was that this Assassin was not only a possible sociopath but also, not an ethical, but fearful, Vigilante... And he had never really made any effort to know his wife... 

One clue was given to arrive at this feeling... Whether that was intentional by the writer, or not, it was a telling point of what followed... You see, quite often the memoir reveals that what he had done was because He Wanted To Do It Himself! Just as he had done to a bully in school! The point of view was even debated from both sides of the coin. That is, he recognized that he realized that murdering a few would not do much for saving the world, but, it had given him a sense of personal satisfaction in doing it... The word retribution came to my mind... He had used a knife but didn't kill the bully, now he had graduated to murder...

Readers will then learn of how he discovered the men he felt needed to be killed. They included child molestors--in fact, anything that affected children would set him off... Now here's where we get into the philosophical part of the story... Anybody reading the book will undoubtedly want to also get rid of anybody who chose to abuse children, in any way. I, of course, have written about this many times... So, the philosophical question would be... "If you thought you could get away with it, would you kill a child molestor, pedophile, etc.?"

Now the thing is that we are all human and have thoughts and free will... I willingly acknowledge that I have many times thought of having a life taken because of their pure evilness... That's why I'm so concerned about losing the Rule of Law... Especially at this time, those thoughts are directed every day as I see the damage being done to America... In fact, this book "kinda" included a section on these issues, but it was lacking in any type of emotional feelings, other than to acknowledge that his fear prevented him from even considering assassinating somebody who had power, money, and an evil spirit, but was protected... I wasn't impressed with his coverage of the issue...

What you will be reading is a somewhat close analysis of most of the issues that are facing each of us in our daily living... and deciding how you are going to respond... When I was working and then supervising a staff, I prepared in advance for mistakes to be made. When a simple mistake was made, it usually can be easily solved and I wanted to develop the decision-making skills needed for most jobs in my office...  However, throughout the book, there is occasional references to believing in God...but then later arguing the option "if" there is a God, or "if" there is not a God, then there could be no punishment internally. My thought was that the question being posed was "Can you be a moral person without believing in a God who is known to provide judgment?" At this point, I didn't see any significant response, other than to believe he was an "ethical" assassin, and that if he wre ever caught, although he went to great lengths to ensure that didn't happen, he would acknowledge his "kills" to prevent a necessary trial... Seriously?

Now, most of my readers will know that I am a "God Lives" person, while at the same time, also questioning what is happening now, using God's name often as a reason as "Christian Nationalism" is spreading...The question then is, would I be willing to read two more books like this?

This is a book where I am going to leave it up to potential readers... I found the book interesting from a purely academic exercise. Normally I would expect a fiction novel to at least provide some type of completion rather than "Time Will Tell..." which says nothing about the most important part of that phrase: When? will time tell...

No, I am certainly no “avenging angel,” or anything remotely like one. It seems that I am just another bit of human detritus polluting the planet with my weakness and selfishness. Hoorah for the human race.

Bottom Line for me was this: It confirmed my opinion that has existed for the latter part of my life, especially, that women, by nature, are more effective decision makers than men... More specifically, we are prone to be empathic, sympathetic towards others unless something has happened in their lives as well... I went into job burnout working to cover the work that should have been done by men in my office... At no time did I ever NOT responded truthfully to what was being worked on... Also, while the men were telling me to act as they said, no matter I knew that they didn't know what they were talking about... I did the job I was hired to do, as defined...

This man, who blamed his wife for leaving him helpless in all the things that his wife had naturally performed without requiring his assistance, suddenly resented the fact that he had to think to make decisions--normal decisions... He couldn't handle that. Women make decisions daily about small and large issues... To give you the best example that everybody would know about--consider that Kamala Harris unexpectedly was called upon to run for president... She immediately acted in response! Yes, she lost, I think, for a variety of reasons, but it was NOT for being unable to take on any task and riding the wave as far as she could go in a limited time... And, personally, I must add, that if her opponent hadn't lied through his entire campaign as the world is now discovering, I believe she would have won... Whether you agree about winning is not the point. Rather that, instead of continuing to lie over and over, and then pulling the stunts he has done this term, we know that his decisions were based on hate, retribution, prejudice and a desire for self-aggrandizement and power.... 

In his timid, fearful way, the vigilate assassin has done something very similar, because, let's face it, Trump's first action taking away USAID has already resulted in many children's deaths... Will the Ethical Assassin proceed to this next step? Frankly, in my opinion, he will do just that in his fearful, hidden way... but will be because he now admits he likes killing people... 

Finally, I have reviewed this book as nonfiction even if the author presented it as fiction... There is no storyline...there is no introduction of characters... etc. this is a presentation of one person's opinions set against a few examples... I've evaluated that presentation as I understood it...as a debate within himself... You might say a Memoir Journal...

GABixlerReviews