Detective Rex Harder tries to stop a Hell from coming that’s already on the way. Riding on the wheels of women with a fury, intent on making men suffer, and suffer some more.
“Turn the body over.”
“Sure Rex, give me a hand.”
Having done so, both men, veterans in their respective professions, stared in disbelief, for Harder’s suspicions had proven correct. They were each looking at a large sign of the female, carved deeply into the victim’s back. Once the magnitude of the situation settled in, Harder, placing his hand on his good friend’s shoulder said to him, “Karl, man has just fallen one rung down the food chain, and is now staring up the proverbial skirts of our most formidable killer – woman.”
A novelist’s Eye
Courtesy of CODE3 Magazine
By day, Tyrone Harper is an emergency medical technician who does his best to treat compassionately the elderly and infirmed patients he transports from convalescent homes, to hospitals in treatment facilities. By night, Harper is an utterly fearless writer whose take on the human condition, especially as it concerns relationships between the sexes, ranges from ferocious, to comical, to touching.
In his first novel, the self published Suffer The Opposition, Harper creates a vivid underworld of predatory women warriors who hunt down men in revenge for the sins of their gender – at least as they are perceived by the women warriors.
The book opens with a scene so explicitly violent, it is guaranteed to make even the most seasoned first responder wince (this book is not for children). “I wanted to draw a strong reaction,” Harper told Code 3 Magazine editor Marty Neideffer recently over a cup of coffee at a Bay Area Starbucks.
He uses the violence to set up two starkly opposing sides in the battle of the sexes. With original and entertaining prose, he uses the remainder of the story to pave the highway, sometimes bumpy, back to a place of peaceful coexistence, if not outright understanding. The highway is traveled by a cast of interesting characters, including the protagonist Queen Levitra.
“I have always had a natural curiosity about words,” Harper said. “I was born into a family, but I was also born a loner. I’ve always had that narrative voice inside my head.”
Harper, 46, grew up in Oakland California and was out on his own at age 18. As an elementary school student, a teacher praised him for his creative writing. From that day forward, he looked at the world through a novelist’s eyes. The people he met along the way are reflected in the characters he creates.
Harper’s strength is his passion and his willingness to risk being outlandish. He’s also a good storyteller. There is a Quentin Tarantino quality about Harper’s work. His writing style fits the relatively new genre known as Urban-Edge literature or “Edge-Lit.” Urbandictionary.com defines “Edge-Lit” as “literature that features edgy urban settings; hip colorful characters; and the cool razor-sharp language of the streets.
There is more to Harper than that, though. His writing, while undeniably edgy, conveys an undertone of empathy for each of the characters he creates. Possibly that comes from years spent looking at real life pain and suffering at his day job.