About the Author
My name is Jack Mardack. I live in San Francisco with my wife Lauren. I wrote this novel more than 10 years ago.
Personal Details that Relate to Ferus Rex
I am the son of a Dominican mother and a Jewish-Colombian father, born and raised in Queens, New York. The novel is set in Corona, where I grew up, and in a mansion in the jungles of the Dominican Republic. The “flesh” for these characters draws liberally on the experiences of my very “urban childhood”. I also draw from experiences with the elements of Santería and Spiritism, owing to my mother’s life-long interest in these. The narrative voice in Ferus Rex is uniquely informed by the immigrant experience and by the sights and sounds to which a child of Hispanic immigrants growing up in a poly-cultural, bi-lingual environment is exposed. I think you’ll find it a voice at once pained by a hunger for identity in an English-speaking, Sesame Street-watching world and enriched by the “music” of my mother’s tongue.