Eco-Terrorism? Hardly. With today's steady stream of mass murders, you'd expect at least one shooter to do us all a favor and target someone who actually deserves to die. Any of the heartless monsters out there intent on killing us all. Pick a few of them. An ugly thought but pragmatic. It's just how Cooper sees things.
And when your body count surpasses a hundred, it's no longer merely how you see things. It's who you've become. Indeed, Cooper's been at it for a while, having embraced this bloody mission on our behalf. Never mind that no one asked him to. No one had to. It's simply a judiciously top-down approach to making a difference.
The FBI would prefer that he go away, and not just because he's making them look bad. It's one thing for madmen to slaughter the innocent and powerless week after week. It's another thing altogether for a perfectly sane citizen to execute the high and mighty with such good reason.
Cooper would prefer sitting on his back porch feeding the birds. Still, somebody's got to save the planet, and no one else is stepping up. Simple solution: Assassinate the worst climate offenders, hoping that will shake everyone else awake. Unfortunately, most are already too accustomed to obscene levels of violence. It leaves no option but to up the ante and violate the ultimate taboo.
Happily, his next targets have chosen themselves. With all their cultural warfare blather, it's only logical to begin hacking at the cultural root of the problem. Nice of them to volunteer.
Any way he slices it, it's time to unleash the worst violence his spirit can bear...for Humanity's sake.
Autorentext
Stephen Pocklington lives on a small Certified Wildlife Habitat within the High Rock Lake-Yadkin River Watershed in North Carolina. This haven is shared with his partner of twenty-four years, their dog Lucille Rose, and a growing number of other species. Amidst this wildlife, the family persists in cultivating formal vegetable and flower gardens, due to which the world has been mercifully spared from several imagined novels.
Stephen is a bruised idealist who's evolved into an apprehensive realist trying to become a decent meliorist. He understands Humanity's peril well enough to be duly alarmed but still believes in human potential. Thus, he remains strangely disposed to imagine humans completing their evolutionary leap into rationality, though, at seventy-four, probably not in his lifetime. He also believes (irrationally) that humans may still be capable of preserving our planet's capacity to sustain us, if only just barely.
Given the context of this novel, readers should note that Stephen holds fast to the precept, Cause no unnecessary harm, and hasn't fired any weapons since the Army took them away, deemed him unfit, and sent him home in 1981. He was a fairly good shot, but then he got better. Since laying down the sword, he has relied entirely on his somewhat bloody pen.