Elevator to Hell

Perhaps crime doesn’t pay. But doing nothing doesn’t either. Still, does any degree of abuse or mistreatment warrant fratricide—killing your own brother? Or, more precisely, half-brother? And when does old fashioned greed take over and disguise itself as simple ambition or self-preservation? Nic Reilly, a thirty-year old Detroit native and top record executive, is laying low in the Mexican Sierras. It’s April, 2005—another brutal year for the music business with the onslaught of the file sharing revolution. With time to burn, Nic recounts how, at seventeen years old, he was informed by his dying working class father that he was adopted as an infant and his biological father is none other than Ben Tyler, a rock legend of the Rod Stewart variety. When Ben unexpectedly and prematurely expires overseas, his considerable estate—which includes a major record label and retail chain run by Ben’s savage brother, Hank—is contested by Hank and by Nic’s siblings from Ben’s two marriages, none of whom want anything to do with bastard Nic. Nonetheless, Nic, the oldest “sibling,” and ostensibly the most level-headed and educated in the disturbed California narcissistic bloodline, fights back and engages, tragically and uncharacteristically, in taboo behavior that changes him forever. The title comes from one of Ben Tylers’s mega-successful albums within the story.