D.L. Shiloh
ROCKFORD, IL. - Halfway through D.L. Shiloh's first novel Pookoo, a crowd of admirers and protesters keep watch over the main character, Katlin Hillmacher, a former Olympic silver medalist. The night before Hillmacher was on TV announcing he had a near death experience and had seen the Angel of Death. From there, things just get worse.
Hillmacher gained a second fame through saving a woman from a fire and also through a two-story fall at a stadium park that was videotaped by a tourist. Shiloh thinks the world should focus on the work of an individual.
“We have an entire culture of fame where the person gets notice but not because they broke a world record, created something or did something of note in society,” Shiloh. said. “It's really surface things, like who had a baby or wrecked their Escalade and got a DUI. Reality breaks are OK, but not permanent vacations.”
Shiloh's work for the book was beefed up by a stint as an independent celebrity and chat producer, with events on AOL's Centerstage. His events included Lt. Colonel Fred Olivi, co-pilot on the Nagasaki atomic bomb mission, Rudolph Grey, whose seminal work Nightmare of Ecstasy paved the way for Johnny Depp's movie Ed Wood, and the curator of the Houdini Historical Center on the 70th anniversary of the magician's death. Shiloh says that the book was fueled by major media events of the 1990s such as the O.J. Simpson trial and the death of Princess Diana. Disaster coverage such as the 1993 Great Flood all the way through September 11th made its mark, too.
“Watching those events in the '90s just threw the writing into fourth gear. By book's end, Katlin's fame just gets bigger. I had made it a small story about obscurity, but a big personality like Katlin Hillmacher needed a big story. The irony is that Hillmacher gets famous for “who he is”, rather than what he once did, and the storyteller is trying to tell the true inside story.”
The book includes a comic-relief character named Lenny the Lobster, which balances the tragic rooted in the story. Shiloh says non-readers of the book haven't grasped that the mascot is a symbol for the main characters. But he says the wry twist of a happy character in a grim landscape amuses those who get it. “We think we know somebody, and there's somebody else inside.”
D.L. Shiloh BIO facts
* Was a small-town sports editor
*Shirt-tail relative to Thomas Paine (Common Sense), William Bradford (Pilgrim father)
*Won silver medals at 2000 Prairie State Games in shot put and discus
*2008 inductee into Roscoe Rush semi-pro football Hall of Fame
*Currently working on novel about mid-life crisis in Chicago suburbs
Pookoo: a satire of celebrity
$10 USD
http://www.createspace.com/
190 pages
ISBN: 1438248164
EAN 13: 9781438248165
FREE e-book available at
www.dlshiloh.com
www.pookoo.net
www.YouTube.com/
Homefield Multimedia
P.O. Box 16314
Loves Park, IL 61132-6314
Tel. 815-639-0769
contact: Doug Smith
Photo:
http://www.prlog.org/
