New York City – Matthew Keville

The Guardian Cats of New York City: The Watcher On The Shore Is Back!

The cats keep the ancient bargain.

They are still among us, hidden here and there; the cats who remember the Old Compact: you provide a home for us, feed us, take care of us in our illness, and we will protect you from the dangers of the night. They operate below the sight lines of humanity, dealing with dangers that we would never notice until it was too late. They remember the old magics of Freya, Bast and Hecate. They are the Guardian Cats.

Nar-Tali the Gull Hunter is the guardian of Coney Island. He walks the boardwalk after dark, protecting humans at play from the things that hunt the night. But tonight, something is coming out of the ocean. Something huge. And Nar-Tali may need a bit of help to handle it.

The Guardian Cats of New York City: The Watcher on TheShore is available for free Kindle download through this Friday, September 9, and after that is only 99 cents. And it’s available for free on Kindle Unlimited now and forever. Check it out and leave a review!

The Guardian Cats of New York City: The Black Dog is Back!

The cats keep the ancient bargain.

They are still among us, hidden here and there; the cats who remember the Old Compact: you provide a home for us, feed us, take care of us in our illness, and we will protect you from the dangers of the night. They operate below the sight lines of humanity, dealing with dangers that we would never notice until it was too late. They remember the old magics of Freya, Bast and Hecate. They are the Guardian Cats.

There is a place in the heart of the City where the lines of force converge. It is a place of peace that used to be a place of vengeance and horror. There is something there, just beneath the surface, that wants to make it a place of vengeance and horror again. And the only thing that stands in its way is a cat named Queenie and a black dog who is much, much more than what he seems.

The Guardian Cats of New York City: The Black Dog is available for free Kindle download through this Friday, August 26, and after that is only 99 cents. And it’s available for free on Kindle Unlimited now and forever. Check it out and leave a review!

The Guardian Cats of New York City: Kodama’s Courage is Back

The cats keep the ancient bargain.

They are still among us, hidden here and there; the cats who remember the Old Compact: you provide a home for us, feed us, take care of us in our illness, and we will protect you from the dangers of the night. They operate below the sight lines of humanity, dealing with dangers that we would never notice until it was too late. They remember the old magics of Freya, Bast and Hecate. They are the Guardian Cats. Kodama is a young cat who lives in a quiet, peaceful neighborhood. He has heard the stories of the guardian cats and he dreams of becoming one of them, but first he must face a threat that strikes much closer to home. Something terrible has entered his quiet neighborhood, and it threatens his humans, the kindly giants who took him off the streets and gave him his name. As he faces one of the hatchlings of the Serpent of Darkness, Kodama must decide what price he is willing to pay to protect the humans who have opened their home to him.

The Guardian Cats of New York City: Kodama’s Courage is available for free Kindle download through this Friday, August 26, and after that is only 99 cents. And it’s available for free on Kindle Unlimited now and forever. Check it out and leave a review!

The Guardian Cats of New York City: Shin-Nephura’s Neighborhood is Back

The cats keep the ancient bargain.

They are still among us, hidden here and there; the cats who remember the Old Compact: you provide a home for us, feed us, take care of us in our illness, and we will protect you from the dangers of the night. They operate below the sight lines of humanity, dealing with dangers that we would never notice until it was too late. They remember the old magics of Freya, Bast and Hecate. They are the Guardian Cats. Shin-Nephura is the Guardian Cat of the neighborhood of Inwood, at the northern point of Manhattan. And tonight, something terrible has crawled out of the Hudson River to prey on sleeping two-legs of the neighborhood she protects. Something that may be too much for her to handle.

The Guardian Cats of New York City: Shin-Nephura’s Neighborhood is available for free Kindle download through this Friday, August 19, and after that is only 99 cents. And it’s available for free on Kindle Unlimited now and forever. Check it out and leave a review!

The Economancer – Epilogue

So that’s the story of my grand adventure. I’ve certainly had other adventures, and I’d be glad to tell you about them if you’re interested, but unlike a certain chain-smoking London street wizard, I don’t save the world every other day.

So what actually happened, there at the end?

La Guardia would have been a match for either Bill the Butcher or Bill Tweed – the spirit of New York’s violence and the spirit of its corruption – but not both at the same time.

So we called in help.

The Economancer Chapter 16 – Closing The Deal

It wasn’t actually that hard to get Bill the Butcher and Boss Tweed in the same room, though it did take a bit of fast-talking in both cases.

I just told each of them that the other wanted to meet to discuss terms of surrender.

I don’t blame Bill the Butcher for buying it. He had every reason to believe that I’d be too scared to try anything clever. But Tweed really should have known better.

The location is important. They’ve gone to the mattresses, and neither wants to come out of their strongholds. If they’re going to meet at all, it has to be somewhere neutral.

Somewhere neutral to them, at least.

That’s how we find ourselves in Delmonico’s.

The True Story of Kitty Genovese

My wife, my sister and I have a tradition for St. Patrick’s Day: she comes over to our place, we eat corned beef and cabbage, and we watch The Boondock Saints.

For those unfamiliar, The Boondock Saints is a 1999 action thriller about two Irish-American brothers in South Boston who come to believe that they’re on a mission from God to slay the wicked.

The movie begins with the brothers, both devoutly (if very heretically) Catholic, attending Mass. One of the attending priests stands up at the lectern and gives a sermon that tacitly approves of the brothers’ vigilante activities. To illustrate his point, he tells the story of Kitty Genovese.

You’ve probably heard the story of Kitty Genovese. The short version is the version the Monsignor tells, which is that a young woman was murdered in broad daylight with dozens of people watching, none of whom intervened because they “didn’t want to get involved”.

It’s one of the most commonly-cited examples of Bystander Syndrome – which is to say, the human tendency to not get involved when they’re in a large crowd, because responsibility is dispersed among that crowd, and everyone thinks someone else will handle it. Less charitably, it’s used as an example of the cowardice and cold-heartedness of human beings in general, or city folk in particular.

Allow me to give you some good news: it’s bullshit. More than bullshit, it’s an outright lie. In the movie’s defense, while there were definitely people who knew that it was a lie in 1999, it wasn’t widely debunked until 2016. Unfortunately, the lie has had decades to sink into the public consciousness as fact (along with all the wrong conclusions drawn from it), but few people have heard the debunking.

So let me tell you the true story of Kitty Genovese.

The Economancer Chapter 15 – High Finance

I’ll spare you the negotiations with Morgan, Rockefeller, and Carnegie. They get repetitive.

The Economancer Chapter 14 – The Thief and The Thug

So Fiorello LaGuardia took me back to his office in the City Hall at the center of New York City’s soul.

It’s a weird day when you can write that sentence.

It was a corner office, as you might expect – or you might expect if you live New York, anyway – and its windows each looked out over a different vista of the City, views that changed each time you looked out the window. First look: Civic Center, like you might see from City Hall in the real world. Second Look: Central Park, looking up from the South, you can see all the way to the Sheep Meadow before it becomes just a mass of trees. Third look: looking out over Batter Park and the Harbor, Lady Liberty lifting her torch in the distance. Fourth look: Times Square at night, showing off its brightest colors.

And so on. This really is the Heart of New York. But then, New York has a lot of hearts.

New York Moment

Sitting on the N train

Riding for Coney Island

First visit of the season

A young Hispanic man and I

Me sitting

Him standing and holding a pole

Watch an old woman with a walker

Get up from her seat, carefully steadying herself against the train’s motion as she gets ready to leave.

We meet each other’s eyes

Then look back at her

Respecting her old New York strength

But each of us ready to lunge and catch if the train’s relentless stop-and-start defeats her

As it has the young and surefooted

The train stops. She plants her walker and gets off.

He gets off too. Not with her. He isn’t her nephew or grandson. They don’t know each other.

I go back to reading my book.

Our eyes don’t meet again. We don’t speak.

Three people who never met.

A New York Moment you won’t see on the news.