Surfing with Sharks

Like so many during the summer of 2020, writer Seve Verdad felt he was watching America, and the world, go mad. In his new novel, Surfing with Sharks, Verdad relives events of that summer and examines universal questions: Has the world gone crazy or am I crazy?…Both? The result is a poignant critique of America’s political and cultural wokeness and COVID-era policies through his main character, an entrepreneur driven to extremes within a universe of extremes. “While a struggle against madness is a timeless literary theme, the book’s narrator is uniquely contemporary,” Verdad says. “Surfing with Sharks reflects both the absurdity and gravity of life itself through a lens focused on the summer of 2020, and the struggles of that summer persist today, may indeed be timeless.”

In Surfing with Sharks, we learn that Colton Candide has done time in prison and rebounded, only to find his efforts thwarted when his burgeoning Fisherman’s Shore Bait and Tackle business is declared nonessential and fails under oppressive pandemic lockdowns. His fiancée is stuck in El Salvador and that country’s lockdown, and the couple’s Los Angeles apartment becomes Colton’s personal dungeon, a bloodied stuffed bear Colton rescues in the aftermath of a riot his trusted confidante. “Colton is intellectually lucid,” Verdad says, “as are many of his actions, and interactions with others. But from the beginning he questions his mental state, and his decline is evident, the elusive cure to his madness palpable. Ultimately his sanity hinges on internal conflict and his war with a world that really has gone insane. Are the conspiracies he sees and lashes out against real? It’s a mad, mad, mad unreal world—the world we live in—and the reader will have to decide…”