"The Coin Cold Heart" by Patrick John Brayer

Patrick John Brayer

Patrick John Brayer was raised on an egg ranch in the steelmill town of Fontana, California. Think Hell’s Angels, think Sammy Hagar, think Shelton Brooks. Developing a unique style of writing early on as an answer to his inability to speak, he went on to receive an education in music from an array of dirt parking lot honky tonks that befriended a Valley Blvd. truck route. To his own surprise his writing has led to the winning of eight Gold, Platinum, and Grammy Award winning projects. To this day he admits that he likes to write prose best because “when doing that, while managing to be unsuccessful, people leave you alone”. Humble but not one prone to self-deprecation he was once heard to say, “Hey, by hook and by crook, I’m better than I’m supposed to be.”

The lyrical nature of the stories in Patrick John Brayer's The Cold Coin Heart create a rhythm, like that of thump of the asphalt under your troubled lost wheels down a ditch of highway with Brayer as a brimstone DJ delivering an imagined history of Fontana, California. In his hands, Cold Coin Heart is a Terrence Malick yarn or maybe a Roberto Bolaño mystery that keeps knocking at the core of things and with every knock the core packs up and moves away across expanses that could be Oklahoma, or maybe San Bernardino. If you are familiar with Brayer's lyrics, you will relish the larger canvas that he explodes herein. Psalms of the working class, narratives and characters colliding with a world out of time.
This book is made up of magical realism origin stories on the eve of annihilation.