Degrees of Separation (Paperback) | Released: 02 May 2013

Shelby Hill, columnist for the Mpls. Herald, travels to L.A. to profile porn king Richard Haybrook, who recently made a two million dollar donation to a local battered women's shelter. A childhood acquaintance of Shelby's, Haybrook--a notorious man in a notorious industry--has big plans for expanding his porn empire into every home in America, and he's halfway there. Shelby's assignment is an uphill battle all the way. Like most newspapers, the Herald is losing money, and his editor wants to ratchet up the titillation factor on his columns while Haybrook wants Shelby to massage his legacy. Shelby increasingly finds himself torn between protecting his job and assauging his subject's massive ego, all the while sinking deeper into the bizarre and seamy world of the L.A. porn industry. Two other P.O.V. characters inhabit this novel. One, a chemical dependancy treatement psychologist named Diane Atkins, is preoccupied with the many challenges her job provides. To further complicate her life, she has a daughter who seems intent upon making her life a living hell -- refusing to grow up, surrounded by perpetual adolescents in the upholstered play-pen of S. California. How much trouble can she stir up? Plenty, in a word. Then there's Jim. A colossal of a man driven by a purpose beyond his understanding. Where did he come from and where is he going? Even Jim can't answer those questions, because he is not his own master. Yet his presence in this novel gives reason for the novel's title, as the aforementioned characters story's begin to merge, and the concept of six degrees of separation gets whittled down, bit by bit, to two degrees, then one, and in the end... well, you be the judge.
About the Author: Joseph E. Charles is a pen-name for a man who has written two previous novels, by his real name. Why the pen name? Read the novel and it may become readily apparent. A reviewer described Charles as "transgressive", a particularly apt description. My dictionary defines transgressive thusly: "to go beyond or over (a limit). To further complicate the issue, what are limits today may not have been yesterday. What is transgressive today... well, you get the idea. Charles is a well-traveled man, and he counts this as his main source of education in life, as he's rather lacking in the more formal variety. That and operating his own small business for the past 20 years, a business which puts him in contact with a wide variety of people, and in a wide variety of situations, combine to round him out in ways that many years of his presence in a classroom probably wouldn't have accomplished. Marriage and fatherhood (two teenage girls) round him out even more, and provide frequent and effective checks on his ego. When your fifteen year old tells you, on a fairly regular basis, what a hopeless idiot (or something to that effect) you are, one tends to remain with feet solidly planted on terra firma. A great antidote to thinking too highly of oneself. When Charles isn't writing (often enough) he's been known to travel to places (these days) like Alaska, to raft remote rivers, to sea-kayak along the coast in S.E. AK, and to wet a line pursuing the run of Silver Salmon. A recent dive trip to Thailand was another highlight, and there's talk of another dive trip to Indonesia in the coming winter. Stay tuned.