Seductive Amoebae is the first novel by Andrew Foley Jones.
Set in a anonymous modern day city… a canyon of buildings and billboards and streets and stores… Seductive Amoebae follows the demise of Thomas Paul…handsome, wealthy and successful… indulging in the excesses that engulf and suffocate him… It is discovered that Thomas Paul’s wife has taken part in a pilot study for a new fertility drug…she dies giving birth to a horribly disfigured child….Paul discovers the drug was issued due to pressure from Filodade… the corporation that created the drug to achieve a launch date. .. Politicians and government scientists have; it transpires; a commercial interest in Filodade. The drug is introduced in a media whirl… despite warnings that it isn’t ready for public consumption…Embarking on what he perceives to be a campaign of natural retribution against Filodade and ultimately against society… the paths of Paul… his daughter… and the CEO of Filodade… Edward Mansfield…inadvertently cross and entangle…culminating in a chaotic… violent… deprived… frenzied and disturbing finale…
An extract of the observations of the central character:
‘I am surrounded by scum… I say I… I could say we… but who am I to speak for the rest of you… I am drinking coffee at a table in a café…the view from the window is of a street… It is not a remarkable street… it is in fact a hugely unremarkable street filled with cars and taxis and buses and stores and offices and people… I am watching this scene and swallowing fast… I am dragging on a marlboro light… my attempt to produce smoke rings failing pathetically… silver clasps rising and dispersing into the nicotine filled air… I am feeling nauseous… I despise everything around me… I need a coffee… I need something to clear my head…’
Comments on the novel:
“Seductive Amoebae imaginatively captures and commentates upon the bleakness of a society… the designer clothes… the reality television… the formatted talent contests… the billboards… the beggars… the neon… the prostitutes… the burger bars… the soulless coffee shops… the everyday horror that confronts us all… the collective components of a society… and the fragile existence we all teeter on: to be exploded… by… perhaps a chance occurrence: the death of a wife…the deforming of a child… the view of a street in a café… a painting at a gallery… an inane debate on the jerry springer show… an earthquake that is happening somewhere…”
“Bleak and menacing… contrived and paradoxical… seductive amoebae is a brilliant… dark… disturbing… and incisive dissection of the modern world…”
“Unconventional … kaleidoscopic and hallucinogenic… seductive amoebae is a dark parody of the disintegration of a society obsessed with… television…beauty….sex… fame… and celebrity…”
The book began in a collection of short stories… outgrowing its origins… soon developing into a novel... written over a number of years in America; Asia and the UK. The author is from Wales and now resides in Chester in the United Kingdom.
