Reuss to make last tour stop

Frederick Reuss, first-time novelist and longtime writer, is saying all the right things about the success engendered by his debut novel, "Horace Afoot."

"I guess I'm not jaded yet," he said in explanation of why he honestly enjoys book tours.

He adds that he's most surprised at the fondness and sympathy readers have had for the book's admittedly odd title character.

"He's very much in the Cynical tradition, and I don't mean the modern sense of the word, but the classical," Reuss elaborated. "I had thought people would be put off by his abstraction, by his ideas."

"I just think the individual, as we see things in modern society, is not looking to be autonomous in that uncompromising way" like Horace.

Courtesy of Lee Anderson Reuss will make his last stop at Shaman Drum.

Reuss' tour for the paperback release of "Horace" will make its final stop at Shaman Drum tomorrow with a reading by the author. Perhaps his unspoiled attitude about touring stems from the few local appearances he made near his Washington, D.C. home when the book debuted.

But the U.S. paperback rights were purchased from the original publisher MacMurray & Beck, by the more well-heeled Vintage Publishing, the distinguished paperback arm of industry giant Random House, and cirumstances have accelerated accordingly.

In the interest of precision, it should be said that to label Reuss a "first-time novelist" is deceiving. "Horace Afoot" is actually only Reuss' first novel to be published. He disparagingly describes himself as "never (having) been gainfully employed," although he did support himself and his family as a free-lance writer and researcher in the Washington area.

But now, with the success and critical recognition garnered by "Horace Afoot," Reuss' actual first novel is due to become his second in less than a week.

But MacMurray & Beck plan to release his first work electronically only, available for downloading via its Website. Reuss added that the price will be less than $10, and that print publishing may be in the works for the future, depending on how the Internet publication proceeds.

"I'm something of a guinea pig for this project," he explained. "They're the first regular trade publisher, by which I mean exclusively publishing for the print trade, to publish a book only for the Internet."

In any event, Reuss will make his return to ink and paper at the end of this August, when his next novel, the already-completed "Henry of Atlantic City," arrives in bookstores.

The forthcoming work appears to be a fanciful work in the lightheartedly satirical vein of "Horace Afoot." The book is about a young child savant who experiences a dual existence: with his family in their residence at the Caesar's Palace hotel and casino on the boardwalk, and with the cohabitants of his imaginative life in ancient Byzantium.

But Reuss offers the counterpoint that as an artist, he has primarily a dark vision. "I'm attracted to the dark side of things," he said. Accordingly, he promises that the novel after "Henry of Atlantic City" will be more representative of these more ominous tendencies.

He's working on that novel now, that is, when he's not fulfilling his tour obligations, as well as those to his wife, two children and diverse reading predilections, which range from the Austrian Thomas Bernhard's darkly satirical "Extinction" to "Such a Long Journey," the first novel in a series by Indian chronicler Rohinton Mistry.

Or anwering the questions of a faraway campus newspaper. And even that, he says he enjoys.

02-24-99