BACK    BS    M    D    T    E    HELLO

YANAPOP: Run For Your Life, a Love Story

A DarkSF Novel by John Argo

If you enjoyed Martin Scorsese’s dark comedic film After Hours (with its all star cast), you’ll love YANAPOP. What starts as a simple boy meets girl romance turns into a suspenseful, hair raising adventure of fantastic and frankly crazy proportions. It’s a wild ride you won’t want to miss.

It’s a lot of fun as the author takes your imagination out for a walk—on the wild side. Martin Brown, 21, is a U.C. Berkeley Lit major, home from San Francisco, and spending the summer with his parents and sister in laid back San Diego. He’s looking for a summer job. Based on a lead from a friend, he ventures to Los Angeles to interview for a writing position with global media giant corporation YANAPOP. YANAPOP creates games, films, books, and anything else involving entertainment, including mythologies involving goddesses and superheroes. YANAPOP is an acronym for Young Adult + New Adult + Participating Older Persons, based on the realities of modern publishing. Los Angeles is just two leisurely hours by car from San Diego on coastal highway I-5.

Martin drives to LA for his interview. He falls into a career opportunity of galactic proportions with a little help from a gorgeous young (21) production assistant named Chloë Setreal. Chloë guides him through his interviews and takes a special interest in the handsome young applicant. Martin and Chloë fall madly and instantly in love that same day.

Martin returns to San Diego, two hours south, where he is spending the summer with his parents and sister. All he can think of is Chloë, seeking some excuse to go back and see her as soon as possible. Chloë is thinking the same, and a little bad luck offers her the opportunity to reach out to her dashing hero.

No sooner has Martin arrived back home, than he receives a call from Chloë in LA. She has been in an accident, is immobilized with her leg up in a cast, and desperately longs for Martin to come hold her hand.

Martin gallantly hops in his car and heads north, just as a tremendous Pacific Ocean storm begins to pelt San Diego. That’s just the beginning of a hair-raising adventure, a nightmare of epic proportions, as courageous and undaunted Martin Brown strives to make it to Los Angeles (or Lost Alienopolis) at any cost.

The Hammer Comes Down…

What should be a two-hour drive turns into an Odyssey lasting, well, a long long time… but dial in to learn all the details. Be amazed, because the story stops at nothing. Like Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, YANAPOP is a bizarre, Saturnalian plunge into the underground—a wildly imaginative, streamlined doomsday machine that never stops for a second until the last desperate, manic breath.

Martin becomes Odysseus in search of Chloë as he pursues the goddess of his dreams. He becomes Oedipa in pursuit of the nightmare secreted in the engine that drives Amerika - and the universe. Or whatever. He goes from a mild-mannered reporter to a comic book hero and an avenger in the mythological landscape of Southern California at its most ingenious extremes. Just when you think you have finally swum ashore, be prepared - the next phase in this air-conditioned nightmare is already sweeping you back out to sea.

YANAPOP is a yarn for lovers of The Crying of Lot 49 and for viewers of Martin Scorsese's After Hours. This is the next great thing.