Other Works
Finding Love in an Upside-Down World
Eugene Flinn & Patricia Flinn
Finding Love in an Upside-Down World is a memoir about the wacky, spontaneous, and humorous adventures of a bright, sassy, spirited girl living with her unconventional, loving family in a small gritty tenement in Hoboken, New Jersey during the 1950s and 60s.
A motley cast of zany characters including family members, teachers, neighbors and friends appear and disappear along the way as she travels through grammar, high school and college where she eventually meets, falls in love with her brilliant literature professor, and begins a whirlwind, unforgettable romance. They marry a year later in 1971, and buy an old farm house a short distance away from a theater owned by a colorful community of eccentric actors.
The marriage lasts for forty-seven amazing, magical years until death separates them in 2016.
Drawing parallels between the unpredictable nature of human existence and the subatomic world of Quantum Mechanics the memoir ends by satirizing how the best intentions of life often go awry. Or as John Lennon once said, “Life is what happens to you, when you’re busy making other plans.”
Finding Love in an Upside Down Universe may make you think as well as laugh.
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The Long Road Home Again
Patricia Flinn
Three women, grieving the loss of loved ones, are guests in a charming bed and breakfast inn in Lily Dale, a historic spiritualist community in upstate New York.
Tree Haven is owned by an eccentric ninety- year old former actress who adores animals, bakes delicious lemon butter cookies, and entertains her guests with colorful stories of her days in theater.
Shortly after the women’s arrival a series of horrific murders befall the scenic lakeside community.
The victims are an aging astrologer named Lady Moon; a woman who believes she is the reincarnated soul of Madame Petrona Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, and a nonagenarian who communes with trees and animal spirits.
Inspectors Robert McLeod and Tara Flanagan are in charge of the investigation, but shortly after learning that his old friends, semi-retired inspector Pequod Dyxx and his clairvoyant wife Evangeline are in town, McLeod persuades them to help with the case.
The suspects include a drifter who believes he is a messenger of God; a priest who terrorizes altar boys and condemns psychics as satanic; blind twin brothers who are members of a self-mortification group, and an unscrupulous real estate man who wants to build a development in the town’s center.
A philosophical mystery, The Long Road Home, is suspenseful, thought-provoking, and satiric from start to finish with multiple plots and unconventional characters.
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Dreaming in Deep Purple
Eugene Flinn & Patricia Flinn
The stories in this collection are rich with eccentric, comical characters and unpredictable plots. In The Dancing Lady of Pleasant Valley, uptight neighbors in a wealthy suburb are shocked to find a beautiful woman clad only in a flimsy nightgown, dancing and singing under their windows after midnight. In Two Handfuls of Aardvark Dung, a hapless husband and wife are rescued from suicide by Noah who agrees to lessen their financial difficulties by giving them ancient droppings from the animals on his ark, which they can sell on eBay. Anyone who hates going to the dentist will relate to Giving Up the Ghost, which is about a haunted barber chair, and music lovers will no doubt be intrigued by the Mouse Who Liked Mozart. In The Cemetery Lady, The Bridge and Brandon McCarthy: Book Lover, the main characters struggle with loneliness, loss, and confusion. Most of these stories are told in the first person, drawing the reader into an intriguing intimacy with the narrators, making it easy to suspend ones disbelief and provide companionship for those long sleepless nights.
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The 1774 House and Other Stories
Eugene Flinn & Patricia Flinn
The 37 stories in The 1774 House and Other Stories are almost as diverse as human experience itself. Here we have tales of eighteen century houses, one rich with the grandeur of the past and another equally historic, but mysterious at the same time. And scarcely a page away is a brief but telling story of twenty-first century dwellings. (“A Tale of Two Condos.”) There are stories of parents and their children, of the joy of sex and of gossip about sex in unconventional places like a church confessional, of unexpected encounters in an old country store, of music, magic, Chaucer, travel, food, animals, Mozart, “honey-dippers,” fleas, harpooned ducks, of religious folks and not-so-religious folks, of the ordinary and the inexplicable, of the city, the suburbs, and the rural countryside, of cooks and kooks. Two dominant themes of the stories are humor and satire, undoubtedly inspired by the many ironies of life. Surely her sense of humor and irony were helpful in the valiant attempt of the young woman to save a beautiful old house from destruction in “The 1774 House.” And once the situation of the plot is established “Chinese Boxes” moves about nimbly on tiny ironic feet. The importance of being fully dressed on a public highway is demonstrated in “What is So Rare as a Day in June with No Pants On?” A woman’s visitor in her bathtub (“I’m Here Too, You Know”), another woman–this one about 90 pounds and 90 years old–with Gaelic wit and the ability to sell a piano on the streets of Hoboken (“The Player Piano”) and the paradox of a Catholic condom in the story of the same name generously provide humor and satire. In “Corrine and the Magic Wand” an eccentric young woman looking for a little love in her mundane life encounters an angry leprechaun in her living room after waving a wand she bought on sale from a mail-order house. In “The Good Earth Revisited: Doggy Style” a terminally ill dog is snatched from death’s door after rolling in his backyard grass.
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Boyd To Malachy to Chance
Eugene Flinn
Readers who seek a vivid and memorable picture of urban boyhood in the first half of the 20th century need look no further. Boyd to Malachy to Chance describes the world of a young boy during the Great Depression (Boyd) through a scholarship to a Prep school (Malachy) to army service in Europe during World War II (Chance) We see the inhibited advances of the youth to his first love when he leaves for the army, where his horizons broaden as he meets young men from other parts of the country. Then the shipping of his unit to Britain, to the beaches of France and to the frozen woods around Bastogne, where the bloody Battle of the Bulge was fought. Every page is alive with a journalist’s objectivity, yet the novel makes a strong appeal to the reader’s emotions. The powerful impact is doubly effective because all the portraits are so memorably drawn. In short, the novel is so powerful because it is so real, and especially because all the people on the pages come to life.
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From Flaubert with Love
Eugene Flinn & Patricia Flinn
From Flaubert with Love is actually four books in one. The first part, beginning with the story of a faithful and loving golden retriever (Flaubert) is a series of seven stories and ending with a novella (If the Shoe Fits, Steal It), each about the adventures of dogs and their human companions. The second and longest section (11 stories) is devoted to humor and satire from the hilarious “A Little Lust for the Elderly” in which a sometimes coquettish and most of the time kinky octogenarian KO’s a mobster, to an examination of the law in Utah where a woman could actually be given the death sentence for having an abortion (“Mrs. Fielding Faces the Firing Squad”), to a somewhat contemporary political story in “The Naked Congressman and the Minister’s Wife.” The third and fourth section concern tales of the Twilight Zone and stories that ask the reader to ponder curious issues in The Elusive Truth.
You will read of a woman’s efforts to make up for the lack of human readership by making a scholar out of her dog, of another dog who achieves a magical healing through the good earth, of how Shakespeare words in effect rose from the grave to protect a landowner from the schemes of crooked politicians and a contractor with no sense of decency, of a male chauvinist thinking of accusing old ladies of peeing in his YMCA pool, of a woman who wakes up to find a naked lady bound and gagged under her bed, and of an epidemic of shoe thefts in a college library investigated by a bumbling security head. There are also two children’s stories, one about a disappearing dog and another about a puppy who changed his mind about geraniums.
From Flaubert with Love begins and ends with the presence of dogs. It is a book for many tastes, but especially for those who love dogs and enjoy laughter.
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Skytrain Over Lake Winniepesaukee
Eugene Flinn
If, as you are going through your mail on a late autumn afternoon, you open a parcel with a slide and photographs of what appears to be a beautiful silver train soaring above the clouds high over a majestic lake without any visible means of support, and in the same envelope there is verification from the United States Air Force that this slide is authentic, not having been doctored in any way according to extensive tests, what would you do? Lisa and Paul O’Donnell, two high school teachers who received the parcel, sought to mail it to Bergen Townsend, the man whose name and address they found inside. But when the parcel was returned to them marked Recipient unknown. No forwarding address, the O’Donnells decided to spend their Thanksgiving break in Lake Winnipesaukee, NH, and see if they could locate Townsend and return his unusual slide. And here is where they encountered the strangest experience of their lives.
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Trapped In The English Department
Eugene Flinn
Members of the English Department of Zarathustra College in northern New England are moderately weird colleagues in fair weather, but when a mid-December blizzard traps them in the English Department’s windowless office without electricity or heat, they become strange bedfellows indeed. Wandering about with only the light of a few candles, they trip over what appears to be a body of one of their colleagues. They cannot be sure, however, because this particular body has no head. The president of the college, who bought his Ph.D. from a place called Ersatz University for $24,995, has a head, but that is about all. The dean of the college, Dr. Gross, not only has a head, but he has a brain enclosed in it. However, rather than use it, he spends most of his waking hours stealing gloves, socks, pantyhose and other coverings of human appendages from members of his faculty. The real power in this college, however, belongs neither to the president nor the dean, but to 275-pound Marsha LaMoosey, designer of the midnight Womb Dance and instructor of Womb 101, open to all students who have wombs. The president of Zarathustra’s board of trustees has a romantic interest in LaMoosey, or so it seems until the threads of an ancient mystery portending great wealth begins to unravel.
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The Counterfeit Nun & The Three Mysteries
Eugene Flinn
Short Description of The Counterfeit Nun and Three Mysteries. The Counterfeit Nun is a story of two lovers, Luke and Jennifer, who have a difficult time getting together because she is a student at a conservative women’s college. Jennifer, who works part-time in the office of the Mother Superior, intercepts a letter from Sister Mary Terese, a nun-scholar about to visit the college and, forging her boss’s name, writes to Sister Mary asking her to delay her visit for a couple of months. Then she dresses Luke in a nun’s outfit and passes him off as Sister Mary. Fortunately no one at Marydale College had ever seen St. Mary Terese, so the counterfeit nun makes a successful debut and is immediately put to work, teaching religion classes, greeting the conservative parents of the students, including Jennifer’s, and becoming a cause célèbre at Marydale. Luke is a bit too successful because one of the nuns, nicknamed The Amazon by the students, becomes infatuated with the counterfeit nun, never dreaming he is not a she. And then the complications begin. Three mysteries, featuring the eccentric Inspector L. Pequod Dyxx, precede the nun’s story.
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Penfield Prep
Eugene and Patricia Flinn Vol. 1 & 2
It is a picaresque novel about a pair of buddies. They are not Don Quixote and the squat Sancho Panza, a leather bottle hanging from his hip as he, in turn, hangs on to his small ass that is carrying him across the countryside. Nor are they the modest Joseph Andrews and Parson Adams, the man of the cloth capable of swashing pig’s blood by the bucket in a pub fight with the best of folk.
These sidekicks are Hypatia and Mick Hogan, daughter and father–one a near Ph.D., the other a Hoboken fireman who loves to smoke and gamble. Together they undertake a journey to scenic New England where Hypatia is about to apply for her first teaching job in an exclusive private prep school. What they encounter on their adventure is not exactly what either of them expected.
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The Listerine Lunatic Hits Hoboken and Other Strange Tales
Patricia Flinn
It is a collection of short stories that takes the reader from the gritty, ultra-realistic streets and tenements of Hoboken to a world of imagination where everything may or may not be of this world.
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One More For The Road
Eugene Flinn
40 Tales of Ireland, Hoboken and Other Faraway Places is a collection of short stories that mixes comedy, satire, sex, love, and stories of World War II.
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The Inn Of The Seventy-Seven Clocks
Eugene Flinn
The Inn of the Seventy-Seven Clocks combines mystery and comedy, featuring a notorious underworld figure who writes stories for little children and a Jewish billionaire with designs on being Pope.
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It Happened In Hoboken
Eugene Flinn
Comic Tales from the Waterfront City by Eugene C. Flinn is a collection of 21 short stories that include an actress whose strict mother does not know she is going on stage naked, a kid who has words with Santa Claus, an elderly woman who advises the manager of the New York Giants, a mobster who buys a fashionable magazine to impress his girl friends, school children who steal Montcalm’s head, a nun who gives the finger to a rude truck driver, a wedding guest who finds himself at the “Reject Table,” horse players who unknowingly stumble on two genuine Monet paintings and try to sell them in a Hoboken alley, a gun fight in a funeral home, and more.
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Trixie Triphammer’s Magical Christmas
Eugene Flinn
Alone in her bedroom at night while her parents are Christmas shopping, little Laura Brown is surprised by a strange and wonderful visitor: a female midget in a St. Louis Cardinal baseball uniform who enters her locked bedroom window without breaking the glass. Trixie Triphammer’s Magical Christmas is a witty tale of youthful innocence and wisdom for all age groups who love the true Christmas spirit.
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The Accidental Tea Room
Eugene Flinn
The stories in this collection are centered on campus life, baseball, city scenes, and self-discovery, but the prevailing theme for most of them is humor with a little satire thrown in. All roads lead to the Accidental Tea Room, bringing together a college professor, a TV crew, a dart player who bites ears, and a trio out to retrieve a cathouse by the light of an August moon.
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Rimsky: and Other Short Stories
Eugene Flinn & Patricia Flinn
Who doesn’t enjoy a sensitive, witty, and heart-warming tale of a lovable mutt rescued just in time from a terrible fate? The title story, Rimsky, is just one of many unusual tales in this varied collection.
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The Metamorphosis of a Hedge Fund Manager
Eugene Flinn
A sacked hedge fund manager has no trouble in making the transition to holding up banks in the short novel that opens this collection. It is followed by novellas about vanishing people in a hospital, a disappearing priest in a church, mad inventors who solve obesity and fuel problems at the same time, two crooks and a cat in a haunted house, and a man who finds a vital piece of anatomy atop the hat of a striking blond entering St. Patrick’s Cathedral to see the Pope.
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The Krazy Katz of Thone: And Other Selected Poems
Eugene Flinn & Patricia Flinn
The seventy-plus poems and songs in this eclectic collection range in style and tone from playful and whimsical to tender, nostalgic and romantic. Golden Retrievers, crazy cats, love, old age, marriage, cities at night, changing seasons, loneliness, baseball, the shifting face of nature, the elusiveness of time, and the pain of loss and death are some of its many diverse and unconventional subjects.
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