Novels by David E. Kendall

David E. Kendall is a prize winning author of Eco-Tales.

Lazaro

Lázaro, the novel co-won the $50,000 Seal First Novel Award in 1983, and in 1986 was adapted for an MGM feature-length movie called Where The River Runs Black, starring Charles Durning and Peter Horton with the musical score by Oscar-winner James Horner.   

Lázaro is a feral child, a foundling nurtured and raised by animals. There has never been a true-life case of a feral child successfully integrating back into human society. The limbs of such children 'rescued' from their bestial foster-parents are misshapen from crawling and running on all fours; they howl at the moon, devour raw meat and manage to learn only a few words and simple commands. Their value system is that of the animal that nurtured them--the law of the jungle.

But Lázaro's adoptive parents are the most intelligent and social creatures outside of the human species--a pod of freshwater dolphins inhabiting the Amazon River system in South America. And Lázaro must emerge from the jungle--to hunt his mother's killer, a 'civilized' person.

They’re not didactic sermons. They’re thrillers, rife with sex and violence and tension and exotic settings. They’re the waning dreams of Conservation Officers. They’re the stories of 10,000 forgotten animals in a world overrun by one predatory animal.

— David E. Kendall

SLAG  

This is the only other novel David has self-published in 2016, in hard copy.  It examines the issue of whether an outcast Indian, a 'dalit' who is born and raised to believe he deserves to be the garbage of society because of his sins in his previous life, can move to Canada, the 'land of the free' and shake his self-imposed shackles.  The protagonist here starts as a Toronto street-cleaner, and then gets sucked into the illegal shark-fin trade with Asia.  Violence ensues.  For this tale, David and his wife Grecia travelled from Rajasthan, India to Halifax where they conferred with a top marine biologist at Dalhousie U.  They went to sea with him and his people and brought aboard sharks to which they attached monitoring devices before returning them to the water.

As the prof explained: the shark population off the Maritimes has declined by 5% a year since 1985 due to the illegal Asian shark fin market.  The result is a massive increase of the seals--the top food of sharks.  The top food of the seal is the cod fish.  The result is that the codfish--once Canada's greatest fish market--has never returned.  It's called 'trophic cascading'.  
Purchase eBook on Amazon

THE BERINGIAN

A story of the first human in the Americas, an exiled woman from Beringia (Siberia, Alaska, and the Yukon). The oceans were 125 metres shallower during the Ice Age, so there was no Bering Strait, which is only some 35 metres deep today. She treks down the northern corridor into North America 13,000 years ago.  I travelled to an Indigenous settlement on the Porcupine River in the Yukon north of the Arctic Circle to research it.  

INKARRI

The follow-up to LAZARO, Inkari depicts the former feral child now grown up to a young man in Peru.  He is very self-contained, not really mixing with urban society.  He stumbles upon an ancient village in the high Andes of people who have no knowledge of civilization beyond the time of the ancient Incan Empire of the 15th century.  He lives at ease with them until the Lima government decides the hidden valley must become a hydro electric project.  Violence ensues, clubs and slingshots against machine guns.  Purchase on Indigo.

ENDANGERED

Daivd visited and consulted with a park ranger headquartered in London, Ontario, who had been the Canadian undercover agent in Operation Falcon, the biggest endangered falcon smuggling investigation ever in North America in the 1980's.  He also visited Montana and met extensively with the top American falcon expert in the operation. The greatest of the falcons is an endangered species called gyrfalcons.  The smuggled gyrfalcons trade for a quarter of a million dollars each to Saudi Arabian falconers.  The top Canadian falcon smuggler lived in Cambridge, Ontario, but fled and was never caught.  His novel's hero, a Canadian conservation officer, treks through Asia in pursuit of the smuggler.

DEATH WISH

David visited the Pacific island nation of Nauru for this novel.  Nauru is the world's most ecologically devastated nation--a once green island, now basically reduced by phosphate mining to a bare rock.  So, no food, no tourists.  The hero and his wife go there.  His wife is dying of Alzheimers, but MAID* suicide is not allowed for mental patients.  The plan is to set up a MAiD* service and invite the world of doomed  patients to come to Nauru for permanent relief. The MAiD customers will import multi-tons of fertile earth to pay for their merciful end, a gradual restoration of the island's destroyed environment. Right-wing evangelists from America come calling, guns in hand.

THE DAWNING

This more recent one I have not put on Amazon.  It's a tale of a group of radical Christian Brothers who set up a secret school in the Ring of Fire in northern Ontario to take young boys and brutally turn them into child warriors (like the 200,000 such child soldiers of Africa) and send them to shoot people setting up programs deemed sinful--such as MAiD or abortion clinics.  Brother Clement takes a child warrior to Nauru, where they've just announced a one-child policy similar to the policy of China to try and stem the growth of their starving population. 

SCIONWOOD  

This novel is a work in progress.  It precedes SCIONWOOD SONG.  It is set in Toronto and Belfountain and deals with the parents of the yet unborn Song.  The bad guys are wood pirates who seek to destroy the local forest and also a nearby heritage stone house.  

POISON BLANKET  

A group of embittered Indigenous people in Canada purchase a weapon of mass destruction from the Russians, who bought the weapon from Saddam Hussein.  The purchasers seek to have a weapon rather than the empty words and lawyers' briefcases of the deprived Indigenous peoples of the Americas.  They don't intend to use the weapon, just to have clout by owning it.  But the plane delivering the weapon, a deadly, batch of incurable spores, is shot down over India amid a rising hurricane and the spores spread throughout the world.  The human population will be eliminated in six months.  But a single Indigenous people deep in the Amazon are immune.  In their hands rests the future of humankind.   

NINE MONTHS:

This follows from David’s unread PhD dissertation on child characters in North American and European classical literature.  David did certain somewhat radical things while at Michigan State University in the Vietnam War years and the Romance Language department refused to read his dissertation.  So he luckily was rescued by the Toronto Sun for 27 joyous years.

The tale has two main characters--a Conservation Officer woman who is pregnant after being gang-raped by three bear smugglers (another huge market in Asia--for bear parts.  An estimated 25,000 bears are illegally hunted in Canada every year) and the fetus.  His rejected dissertation described that not a single one of the 200 or so classics he read showed the child's development before reaching the so-called 'age of reason'.    

*Medical Assistance in Dying. Canada was to allow people with failing minds to opt in advance for MAiD starting in March 17, 2024.  They then stalled twice putting it off until March 17, 2027.