Everything is just a little more difficult for thirty-something Margaret Rudge. Adjusting to single life after her no-good husband Tommy leaves her for a shrink, Margaret manages to snag a job slinging coffee on the street. “Everyone hooks up waiting for their latte,” her sometimes-fabulous friend Cindy advises. And maybe it’s good advice because it’s while working at Frank’s coffee cart that she meets a handsome young dancer and is drawn into the exhilarating and slightly unhinged world of a NYC modern dance company.
Margaret is stuck in a jack-in-the-box, and author Mark Wagstaff expertly mans the crank, turning the lever over and over, letting eerie circus music slowly fill your head. Will she find what she’s looking for? Is it hiding in the strangely lit aisles of her downstairs grocery store? Maybe it’s avoiding her calls, holed up with a new girlfriend, the cognitive psychology graduate, in a condo in Phoenix. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s coffee-stained and unexpectedly expected.
In Attack of the Lonely Hearts, each character is broken in their own forlorn way. A master of the dark and witty one-liner, Wagstaff manages to spin a hilarious and off-kilter story about what can happen when lonely hearts discover they’re attached to even lonelier bodies.
Mark Wagstaff’s work has appeared in Rockvale Review, Ginosko Literary Journal, Solstice and Does It Have Pockets? He also won the 39th Annual 3-Day Novel Contest with the off-kilter romcom, Attack of the Lonely Hearts. Mark’s latest novel, raucous teen thriller On the Level was published in 2022 through Leaf by Leaf, an imprint of Cinnamon Press. His new novel, Mascara, will be published by Cinnamon Press in June 2025.
