Boca Chita: Surviving in Paradise

BOCA CHITA KEY, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Benu Books announces the release of Lance Long’s new novel, Boca Chita: Prepare. Escape. Survive., available as an eBook on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. This post-pandemic adventure is set in a future that may arrive sooner than we expect. A forty-acre island in the Upper Keys, halfway between Miami and Key Largo, Boca Chita is a real place. Few who visit the island rate it as anything less than paradise!

“The novel’s cinematic pace might be applicable to either the movie or television industry.”

The Mayan calendar, which dates back 5,126 years, suggests a cataclysmic event will occur on December 21, 2012 that will put an end to the world as we know it. The End may well happen within our lifetime, and only the prepared will survive. Following 9/11, many Americans came to realize it wasn’t a matter of “if,” but rather “when.” This novel speaks to the more than 4 million Americans who are self-identified Preppers and Survivalists, though most are more concerned about stockpiling food and weapons than retreating (bugging-out) to defendable hideaways. Novelist Lance Long offers an attractive alternative to this siege mentality: prepare a survival-platform boat, live aboard at an affordable marina, and when the Event occurs, bug out to one of the thousands of deserted islands along the coasts of Florida.

Boca Chita introduces Mark, a 62-year-old curmudgeon who escapes from a pandemic virus to a deserted island in Biscayne Bay on his well-equipped trawler. While Mark avoids human contact, visitors manage to find him and he has encounters with a Haitian death ship, Cuban rafters, smugglers, slavers, a sailor dying from cancer and a pair of terrible twin sisters. Nature follows the manmade pandemic with a series of cleansing forces including a big freeze, a drought, devastating fires that burn from the Everglades to the sea, two hurricanes, and a massive flood which occurs when Lake Okeechobee breaches its dike and releases a thirty-foot wall of water. Boca Chita, a parable of man’s inability to control nature, is the first novel in the NOEL trilogy, which will be followed by Calusa Coast and The First Coast. A New York publisher who reviewed the book commented: “The novel’s cinematic pace might be applicable to either the movie or television industry.”

Author Lance Long is that literary rarity who knows how mechanical things work and can fix almost anything. He can operate a bulldozer, fly a plane or navigate a boat to any safe harbor. He worked his way through a Ph.D. in English as a carpenter, painter, and mason. He currently lives aboard his boat and cruises the Florida coasts and the Keys.

When Lance was asked on a television show with whom he would most like to be shipwrecked on a deserted island, he answered unequivocally, “Thor Heyerdahl.”

About the Company: Benu Books is an eBook publisher with offices in Connecticut and South Florida. For more information please visit www.bocachita.net and contribute to the http://boatbugout.blogspot.com/.