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All works are copyright 2008 by Tom Hayes. All rights reserved.
Spirits of Al Rabbad (with Karl Cates)
Feature-length screenplay
Genre: Comedy Adventure
Tagline: Don't lose your head in the desert moonshine
Two Americans, Russ and John, begin an illegal liquor production/distribution scheme in Al Rabbad, a fundamentalist Middle Eastern country. Sound insane? Well, their business partner is none other than the local prince, Ahmed, and his portly American lover, Ricci, who hope the venture will help make Ahmed king. Along the road to the throne, John falls in love with Ahmed’s wife, Teekra, who is plotting her revenge against Awad, the king of Al Rabbad. Maybe John doesn’t get “it,” but Russ is there to give him a push in the right direction when the time comes in this irreverent comic adventure story!
Read Spirits of Al Rabbad now! Seven Angels (first two chapters)
Novel
Genre: Adventure, dark comedy
Anaheet is an obscure Armenian artist who is dying of cancer during the insanity and paranoia of Stalinism. On her deathbed, she completes her masterpiece just as KGB thugs kick in her door to haul her away and shoot her. Too bad for them, she is already dead. Her painting passes to Peter Balshoy, director of the Armenian KGB, a man without mercy or pity. What will he do with Anaheet's magnum opus? Will he destroy it? If you want to find out, click here! The ideas I'm working on are: What is art? What is the importance of art? And also, there's a bit about the nature of reality and god (my constant companions). Coma
Feature-length screenplay
Genre: Fantasy, adventure, comedy
Tagline: Is a wonderful life just an illusion?
John West has it all ... a beautful girl, a great job he loves, a wonderful life. But is it all just a hallucination? After six years in a coma, John wakes up to find his beautiful life swept away in a storm of experimental drugs, and he has no recollection of his pre-coma existence. His choice is clear: stay in a drab world not of his making and beyond his control, or return to his happy life in the "other" world. Coma is a comedy that challenges our everyday conceptions of reality, god, love, George Bush and various other hallucinations!
Armenian Blue
Novel
Genre: Adventure, fantasy, comedy
Armenian Blue is a dark fantasy-adventure-comedy, but with a "nice" ending. Hunter, an American, has lost his Armenian wife during a terrorist attack while on vacation in Sri Lanka. He goes back to Armenia after her death to raise his son and try to put his life back together, unsuccessfully for the most part. Hunter is also clairvoyant, but as he notes, his ESP has never been particularly useful to him, as it seems to only occur for trivial matters.
All this changes, when he goes on a trip to Georgia to help his friend Mark, a photojournalist, do a story on the lawless Armenian enclave of Javakheti. Here, Hunter, Mark and their friend, Tigran, are kidnapped and held for ransom by Sarkis, a sinister, shadowy figure, and his daughter, the beautiful, but equally sinister Katya. Can they break Hunter, bend him to their will, use his clairvoyant powers for their evil purposes? Will Hunter and his friends escape? And who is really the power behind Sarkis?
The novel explores the nature of god, death and reality, and I hope that it has enough twists and turns in it to keep you interested throughout the 140 or so pages of the narrative.