Description

Stories in the Key of Song is a mix of literary styles and subject matter, ranging from realistic portrayals of characters to horror, surrealism to meta fiction. The stories have been written over the past 10 years and D’Andrea says just as he appreciates a variety of styles in listening to music and playing the drums, he wanted to dabble in different writing approaches.

“What’s in a name?” the author wonders in his autobiographical opening essay “I Lame: The Story of My Name” and comes to some surprising revelations about his famous namesake. In “Bus Stop, Bus Goes,” the first fictional story in the collection, a troubled older woman with an ear for music, especially The Hollies, encounters a young man on a Transit Windsor bus on a cold New Year’s Day morning.  “SwitchSides” tells the strange story of a woman who decides to switch things up in her life and her husband’s story continues in “Mexican Siesta,” a surrealistic tale set in the Riviera Maya in the age of Donald Trump. In “Worm Hole,” the 1940 photo of a bombed-out library in Kensington, England serves as the literal window into another dimension. “Server OUTRAGE!” tells the story of what happens when an IT worker’s typographical error launches a computer virus into a company’s information systems.

A writer in “Passatempo” serves Merlot and confronts his rival in a watering hole called Il Grotto. In “Julie Andrews vs. Alice Cooper,” a publicist’s lawsuit against a rock and roll legend over alleged plagiarism sets the stage for an epic, nightmare revenge rock opera that is denied — or is it? — by a real-life tragedy. “The Good Gingerbread Man” is a children’s tale about a character in costume trying to do good over the holidays. “Carol’s Last Christmas” looks at a day in the life of an aging curmudgeon who may have had an epiphany on Christmas eve. And in “I Meme Mine,” a failed writer finds success if not fame and fortune in the afterlife by mining George Harrison memes.