Michael D. Meloan's stories have appeared in Wired, Huffington Post, Buzz, LA Weekly, Larry Flynt's Chic, and many anthologies. He was an interviewee in the documentaries Bukowski: Born Into This and Joe Frank: Somewhere Out There. With Joe Frank, he co-authored a series of radio plays that aired on National Public Radio. Film rights were secured for his short story "The Cutting Edge," which appeared on Wired. With his brother Steven, he wrote the novel The Shroud. For many years he worked as a software engineer.
My mailbox contained a surprise a week or so ago: Pinball Wizard, a novella by Michael Meloan. It is one of the most satisfying reading experiences I’ve had in recent years, in part because it handles a famous writer (Charles Bukowski) as one of its main characters with nonchalant deftness. Meloan’s slightly picaresque story is hard to classify, which is one of the things that makes it such a pleasure to read. He has a gift for writing unapologetically masculine prose; it’s flavorful without being exotic, and it doesn’t hurt that he has a fine ear for dialogue.
No one creates a sense of mood and place quite like Meloan. He’s staked out his own turf.
