This pulp writer enjoys reading Andy Edwards for his form alone. In style he always has something to teach me. It is so nice that he is writing again while raising a family in hard times. I hope to see more from him.
Crowbar begins with truncated scenes of Deep State bad men, The Man in Black, Cohen, the MK Ultra beast goon DeAngelo, introduced in in Mexico: dark and darker. These appear as USG black ops goons conducting anarcho-terrorism across the nation. But they soon bloom wickedly into something even deeper—the fact that we live upon a spider web constructed for our consumption. The thirst for innocence to consume is presented as black ops criteria. Crowbar mixes iron heel USG adventure, horror and science-fiction with the metaphysics of creation.
The neutral, mercenary duo, Jay and Al, Rhodesian ex-special forces, appear in Southern California as, “Exiled. Travelers in the dream American. Travelers in dreams come to be good listeners as every dream has its tonality.” These men offer a balanced perception, retaining a morality, congruent with, but adjacent to, the all-consuming power politics of money, science and murder embodied by characters like Cohen and the sinister Mr. Engelbart. Beastly guns for higher, death-hungry brutes with motes for souls, like Shawcross and DeAngelo field menace enough that one hopes Al and Jay might turn out to have souls.
The large cast makes of crowbar something that would adapt will to a mini series. The short sub chapters and changes of scene strike me as easily worked into a script. The landscapes are places I have visited and I find to be serenely sketched in authentic:
“Bellingham, Washington. Sleepy town, weather perfect in August. USPS deliveryman Jeff Edmonds in civilian clothes…”
The Phoenix area, perhaps near where Andy recorded so many warhorse podcasts:
“Hot asphalt all the way to his exit and then tomato fields laying out in the desert like great altar rugs set for worship of cruel and silent planet gods.
California scenes show the men in stark relief:
“As with certain varieties of equatorial lizard, Cohen lounged purposeful. Cohen lay back. He aggregated power from the environment.
“...like men dipped up out of life and deposited into some apparitional realm.
South African impressions of Eugene Oregon are precious:
“Eugene, Oregon. Mid-morning, quiet. The train a mile off whistled heavy. Jerry Garcia whistled dixie. Garcia sat the bench outside Sy’s Italian Pizza one block off the University of Oregon campus.”
The Deep State Research Facility evokes this reader’s greatest fears:
“… geeks who could not in the aggregate summon even a single intimate encounter with the opposite sex. Being told they were geniuses meddling with forces they couldn’t understand drove attachment to the dream. Citizenship issues bypassed, massive tax-free salaries issued. Total secrecy achieved… It was like being on a ship. Except you never dock and you never leave. God and country. Family not so much.”
Remote viewing experiments linked with USG serial killers and drug cult leaders presents a web of linkage that treads too closely to the CENTRAL truth of America. One is refreshed and frightened to see it in a novel, in that the author, who looks keenly into Creation, as opposed to this reader who scuds across it mapping rocks and shoals, understands Aristotle’s ancient axiom that Truth can only be tackled in poetics, or fiction as we name it.
Time is slipping, creation cycling, with drugs and music important to mazement of the masses. Jerry Garcia is still alive and leading the Grateful Dead as mass-mind shaping pipers, or, are the men of iron of the early 21st Century slipping back in time to 1982? In this, the collision of worlds, profane sickos using remote viewing, psychiatry, drugs and murder to shape reality back towards a cthonic cycle, hunt the world for innocence to corrupt and life to cruelly partake. Orthodox monks, a priest, hippies, a widower, a seer, and a savant seem to be in opposition to these dark governmental forces of evil.
This reader is intrigued, eager to get the rest of the story, delivered in bullet point scenes that paints visuals on the reading mind easily. The author, Andrew Edwards, has done his job. So here, I stop summarizing narrative at page 55 of 172 so as not to spoil. I would like to quote a scenic passage that I have experienced as a passenger often in the Pacific Northwest, where I shall hopefully meet Andy this winter:
“Two hundred miles of hard rain for Edmonds. Just chasing the black ribbon through sheets of gray northwest miasma. The sound of rain on the sheet metal roof overrode the drone of its tires on the road and the tires of those others on the road. Every exit he noticed the birds. Great white clouds over Bellingham cleaved upon arrival. A long portal of blue clean sky appeared out over the bay. He wove the seaport road up into his neighborhood and the pelicans and gulls took flight.”
An empathy key is unveiled on page 58, drawing this reader sharply in at that very point. This is the point, the turning of the first third of the tale, where I like to recommend a novel to a reader, having been drawn by its art to read the middle and end more rapidly than I did the beginning. This also promises a pleasing reread at a later time, in a varied place. I might like a print copy of Crowbar to read on the Oregon Coast, where a seminal scene has drawn me deeper into the narrative seam.
I would then write a very different kind of impression of Edward’s fascinating command of the fabric of Time. These satanic actors seem bent on unchaining Prometheus and freeing Khronos at the same stroke. The wretched morality and slithersome character of most of the viewpoint characters in the first third of Crowbar, has left a garden door open as a narrative counterpoint to the accurate sketch of evil USG thus far. Andrew has established a brutally disposable world where evil extends putrid tendrils beyond death and into the fiber of Creation. Now is placed a character cradled in unusual isolation and innocence in the path of the mind and body rapists of the warlock coven whose human tools, are those who upon us impose their soul crushing rules.
I shall be thrilled to read the rest of Andrew Edwards Crowbar in the high desert of New Mexico, then a paper version in the Pacific Northwest.
-Coal Canyon, Colorado, 10/14/25
