I experienced a few personal fears at play in the novel Lords: Part One.  It tugged at my psyche in moments that hit close to home.  In Lords, you will be taken on a journey from the streets of Hollywood to the streets of Bakersfield.  An endemic array of the troubles of youth.

Like many others, I ran away from home to get away from parents who weren't much of what they seemed.    Never providing a stable home, my parents forced me to lived here and there around Bakersfield.  I stayed with friends and with Aunts and Uncles, from the projects near Martin Luther King Park, to the South West near Grissom Park, and in the Oleander area a few houses down from the "Spiritual" book store where I filled my mind with the occult at that time.  I got my share of culture from Bakersfield, to Compton, to San Antonio in Texas.  I've traveled a long road blind to my surroundings.   Most of the time filling my head with the fantasy world my Mother taught me so well to achieve when she would laugh, a loud cackling sound just a room away with her drugs of choice and "boyfriend" of the evening .  Men who would look at me and say, "Wow, you look just like your Mom!"  To which she would reply, "She's too young for that."   Thankfully, my Grandparents took me in more than once.  

These are not happy moments to remember.  Not sparked by reading the novel.  It simply never left me.  I only hope that the corruption that has a hold on this town, on this world can be overturned someday by raising our children, other than turning the cheek against what is painfully obvious. 

Surely everyone has heard of the Lords of Bakersfield novel, Lords: Part One by N.L. Belardes by now.  If you haven't, you should grab a copy at Russo's in the Market Place, or at Noveltown.net.  You will learn more about Kern County than you already thought you knew.  Fiction?  Yes, the novel is fiction.  But, if you read it you will start to question fiction from facts.  You will question much of what you thought was not possible and must not be true, but possibly is truth.  Our daily lives are filled with little white lies that we tell to each other and even to ourselves.  Who are we to judge what is fact, or fiction?  Does anyone ever really know truth?  

Lords of Bakersfield on Myspace:  www.myspace.com/lordsofbakersfield

MAS Book Club Discussion:  www.masbakersfield.com/home/ViewPost/55868

Or, go to www.nlbelardes.com for more information. 

Look out for Lords: Part Two