The Kindle edition of my short story is now free for Amazon Prime members at Amazon in the Kindle store.

Originally published in the New Yorker, this harrowing tale of reverse culture shock is a cult favorite among expats who wander abroad and are unprepared for the shock that awaits them upon return to the first world.

Bush Pigs, by Richard Dooling.

After three years in the bush, a Peace Corps Volunteer is evacuated from war-torn Sierra Leone and sent home to Omaha, Nebraska, where he attempts to celebrate his return in a steak house. What happens next is called reverse culture shock. G.K. Chesterton put it this way: “The whole object of traveling abroad is not to set foot on foreign land; it is to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land when one returns.”

By Richard Dooling, author of White Man’s Grave, a novel.

If you haven’t tried Google Book Search yet, try it out on a few of my books.

If you have the time, you can read the whole book online:

• Critical Care: A Novel, by Richard Dooling;
• White Man’s Grave: A Novel, by Richard Dooling;
• Brain Storm: A Novel, by Richard Dooling;
• Bet Your Life: A Novel, by Richard Dooling

Google’s book scanning project is controversial (see, e.g., Google’s Moonshot, by Jeffrey Toobin at The New Yorker), but a quick survey of the titles available shows that most publishers are wisely going along with the plan.

A Novel by Richard Dooling

Read the first chapter of The Journals of Eleanor Druse at Amazon.

I wrote this book as a tie-in to the Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital project.

Eleanor Druse, inspired by the original character from Lars Von Trier’s mini-series and played by Diane Ladd in our version, was a delightful voice to inhabit during the months before Kingdom Hospital aired.

The project also enabled me to investigate the abundant literature on out-of-body and near-death experiences and to investigate the “land in between,” or “Swedenborgian space,” as Sally Druse so loved to call it.

The Journals is a prequel to Kingdom Hospital. If you peruse the Amazon reviews, you’ll see that some readers are bothered by this, but most don’t seem to mind. The novel is a prelude to the series, yes, but it works by itself, too.