Soft Click of a Switch

Carter W. Lewis’ Soft Click of a Switch is a darkly comic platonic love story about two strangers, Ed and Earl. Young and unpredictable, Ed wants to Do Something Big And Important by leaving a permanent mark on the world, while the middle-aged Earl wants nothing more than to forget everything. With instructions from a library book, Ed and Earl start building bombs…out of air conditioner parts. Before long, unattended drive-through fotomats start exploding in the night and the two become notorious in the tabloids.

Published in 1998, Soft Click of a Switch is a story ahead of its time, written in the days before the term Domestic Terrorist became common vernacular. Soft Click of a Switch is an exploration of the disaffected and disenfranchised, presenting its characters in three dimensions rather than as societal ogres shaped by media-framed sound bites, bullet point factoids or the typical neighborhood buzz, “He seemed nice, and mostly kept to himself.”