Death on the Toilet Audio CD, read by Gary Warner Kent!

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”  ~Francis Bacon

Just as some stories are meant to be heard.  

Death on the Toilet, a short story by Robert Stikmanz, has crossed over into audio territory, and is now available through Confabule as a $5 compact disc.

Retired Hollywood actor, director and stuntman, Gary Kent, gives new life to the story of 82-year-old Bigger MacGregor, who walks in on Death, quite literally, sitting on his toilet.  Without much of a choice, MacGregor accepts Death's challenge of keeping the scheduled appointments—one appointment, in particular, that could lead him to his enemy, the man responsible for wiping out acres and acres of valuable forest and land.  The man MacGregor would love most to see dead: developer Duane Tremaine III. 

Ironically—at least, it seemed to him ironic—the line he traveled was the length of ditch where his beloved strip of wild had been. He moved through the air nine feet above ditch bottom, as though his role as Death's stand-in forced him to travel the ghost of a landscape that no longer existed. In passing, he felt, with a clarity absolute and unmistakable, the signature of each organism that had been snuffed during the excavation. Every extinguished clump of grass, every uprooted shrub, every broken insect touched him with its identity.  --excerpt from Death on the Toilet

 To prepare for the part, Kent said he studied the delivery of a master storyteller, famed actor Boris Karloff. “Boris was not afraid to take his time, punctuating his stories with discreet pauses and breathing life into exposition and description,” he says.

In just 18 minutes, Kent does exactly so, pausing at the right dramatic moments, annunciating key phrases.  It’s as though he embodied the character MacGregor himself to express unwritten emotional subtleties—the exhaustion that comes with aging, but also the verve and audacity present as one struggles to maintain integrity, all the way to the end. 

Beyond this, what Kent ultimately brings to Stikmanz’s story is warmth.  It is the voice of a grandfather reading to his grandchild, snuggling together by a fire.  The type of story that a grandchild will wish to tell his grandchildren, too.  Because Kent undoubtedly reads with heart.

The audio disc comes packaged in a thick paper sleeve with Stikmanz’s illustration, “Night Harvest.” 

It was mastered by Mark Lewis and produced at Affordable Audio in Austin, Texas, and is available through Confabule at Robertstikmanz.com.

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"G'teoksh," a poem by the incredibly brilliant, talented Amanda J. Kimmerly, translated into Dvarsh, the language created by the also incredibly brilliant and talented reperiolinguist Robert Stikmanz, as featured in the seminal work The Way It Grows: http://soundcloud.com/robert-stikmanz/g-teoksh.