The Nature of Monsters by Ron Malfi is now cheaper. For serious. You can get one of Malfi’s best books for only $10.17 at Amazon right now. Yes, that’s right. Damn cheap, damn good Malfi.

From the back:
“Love is the seed embedded in the skin,” Donna whispered, “germinating.”

Robert Crofton, a socially inept and naïve young farm-boy, arrives in Baltimore to write his first novel and to reacquaint himself with an old hometown friend: poet-turned-prizefighter Rory Van Holt. In an effort to resume their peculiar and mysterious friendship, Robert Crofton abruptly ensconces himself in Rory Van Holt’s circle of friends. Robert soon finds himself sinking deeper and deeper into the quagmire that is their lifestyle. They are corrupt and privileged socialites, damaged by extraordinary wealth, gluttony, greed, arrogance, and power. Dreamlike, the characters float in and out of Robert’s life with inebriated casualness while Robert’s innocence invites these characters to subtly abuse and ridicule him while also accepting him, for the purpose of their own relief against monotony, into their monstrous society.

When Nigel Sweeny, Robert’s eccentric and doomed cousin, falls is love with Rory Van Holt’s fiancée, Donna Taylor, they all suddenly find themselves trapped in a bizarre and often contradictory love-quadrangle.

The Nature of Monsters is both uniquely modern and delicately classic in its style and execution. The story is an exercise in human frailty and love, while exploring the struggle between personal gratification and the damning, acquisitive allure of monetary wealth.

You can also download and read a 7 page except.

Ronald Damien Malfi is one of the more compassionate, insightful and thoughtful new voices in contemporary American fiction. To say he’s a writer to watch would be to be too obvious – he’s a writer watching us.
—Michael Hemmingson, author of The Rose of Heaven

“Expect to hear and see Ronald Damien Malfi’s name everywhere in the future.”
–Nancy Jackson, Midwest Book Review

You can also, of course, get his magnificent book Via Dolorosa as well.

A young soldier and his wife go on an idyllic island vacation but they can’t escape a tragic past that is slowly unraveling their future, even as they try desperately to hang on to each other. A story of war, love, and moral fortitude, told from the perspective of a man who must reexamine his concept of everything he once believed to be right when everything has gone wrong.