Under the El Serial Subscription

Tom Cook’s novel, Under the El, is presented as a serial in eight issues of Bellowing Ark, from the March/April 2008 issue (Volume 24 no. 2) through the May/June 2009 (Volume 25 No. 3) issue. It will give you a view of  hope in a desolate world.

 

Talk is impossible every six minutes beneath the Kensington Avenue elevated train. A retarded boy being led home by his ten-year-old sister, an Avenue working girl with her first date of the night, and two thieves discussing the score-of-a-lifetime must all pause for the five seconds it takes the train to thunder through their lives. Every six minutes, love and lust and larceny must pause and pay a tribute of silence. This is a story of one cold winter and a few of these one hundred thousand people who live—Under the El. In the wintertime, the ghetto kingdom of Kensington is frozen to death like a street-bum who fell asleep in a cozy pile of trash or a bottle of beer forgotten in the freezer, a foolish oversight. Wintertime among the people of this modern medieval village was a city planner’s criminal oversight. The elevated train was not built for the people who live there today. It was built for the immigrants of a century ago who worked in the neighborhood’s factories that now stand abandoned as a reminder of a time when there were jobs and pride and everyone’s son was going to ride the El as a doctor and no one’s daughter was going to walk the Ave. beneath the El for twenty-dollar tricks.