New York City, January 4, 2009–Conglomo House announced this morning “with substantial remorse” that it has canceled the scheduled February 1st release of Mack Hooper’s novel Stiffs Scattered Down a Lonely Road because the book was found to have been based on actual events.

While police in Hooper’s hometown of Junction City, Texas, have long questioned the synchronicity of the plot line with local events, Conglomo House editors steadfastly defended the novel as “a pack of lies” since last summer even though the first-time author failed the standard pre-contract polygraph test when he claimed he wasn’t telling the truth.

According to uninformed sources, the discovery of truth in a novel is evidence per se of breach of contract.

“Ignoring the results of the polygraph test was a bad judgement call on our point,” said former acquisitions editor Nell Quickly. “We were in too much of a rush to get Hooper’s shocking, sharply written thriller about the horrifying demise of a minister’s five former trophy wives out to the public.”

Junction City police chief Hank Kruller told reporters at a County Line Road news conference that gossip columnist Monique Starnes, writing about the novel in the local Star-Gazer, caught his attention when she said, “This story is so real, readers will smell fresh blood on the page. You just can’t make stuff like this up.”

“While I thought Starnes was just another fru-fru reporter out there making it up, I began to suspect Hooper wasn’t,” Kruller said.

According to Conglomo House editor in chief Fred Smith, publishers often find it necessary to cancel memoirs that turn out to have been faked, but withdrawing a novel based on claims of veracity is unusual.

“Speaking off the record,” said Smith, “I’m a busy man trying to reduce the amount of red ink around here, so don’t expect me to run for the border when some small town Barney Fife leaves me a voice mail asking if I know that all five of Hooper’s ex-wives have come up missing.”

Hooper’s agent Lucy Lake, his greatest fan ever since the manuscript for Stiffs Scattered Down a Lonely Road arrived in an old gun case three years ago, said she not only saw the novel as the best crime fiction to come across her desk in years, but one that would bring “hen-pecked male readers” a substantial amount of vicarious pleasure.

“Mack told me the stains on the manuscript were ketchup,” she said.

When confronted with the shallow unmarked graves scatted down County Line Road three miles from his parsonage, Hooper confessed to having based his novel on the unsolved crime. He was subsequently taken into custody for obstruction of justice and improper use of poetic license.

“If he’d come forward when he began writing the novel and told us who his protagonist Jack Cooper really is,” said Kruller, “we might have been able to close this case before all of Hooper’s wives were dead and buried. What a great memoir that might have made for the bean counters at Conglomo House.”

from the Morning Satirical News