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David Acuff

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David Acuff grew up the son of an Air Force Colonel and lived all over the US of A. But being the new kid every year in school taught him a certain objectivity; being the outsider gave him the best vantage point to view all of these different lives and delicious stories and how they intersected and collided with often unexpected results.

Acuff has written six novels and a comedy semi-memoir. Three of his books, including "Battle Tides", are Amazon Best Sellers. Two of his novels, "High School Masquerade" and "The Wrestling Girl" have been produced as Feature films; the latter has been released as "Restoration" by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

Currently, Acuff is a writer and filmmaker in Los Angeles, CA and was a Producer-Editor for Walt Disney Television for 8 years. He enjoys doing voiceover work for Audible book projects as well as animated characters.

His life-motto is very simply, “What doesn’t kill you makes you funnier!”

Follow him on Instagram and Twitter: @DavidAcuff

BATTLE TIDES Cover
SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY

BATTLE TIDES

BY David Acuff • POSTED ON May 2, 2024

In Acuff’s SF novel, the first in a series, a soldier in hiding attempts to discover the secret of the ghost haunting his biosynthetic body.

The year is 2561. Human colonies have spread across the universe through the use of wormholes, and extreme genetic modification has progressed to the point where some people, like Jacques Bastille, have become very hard to kill. When Jacques wakes up in the middle of a dune-filled desert, one of his biosynthetic arms ripped from its socket, he looks up to find his spaceship wrecked and smoldering nearby. He has no idea how he got there—his mind is missing key information, and his memories seem to be spliced with those of another person, a test pilot on Earth named Dash Strouthers. Jacques’ first order of business is to fight off the reptile-like bounty hunters that shot him down. He steals their ship and heads to the edge of the settled universe to find out who wants him dead and why. There he visits Bender the Reek, the universe’s last living Reek (or Re-cycle geek), whose business is extending human life by illegally replanting consciousnesses in new bodies (or “meat-suits,” to use the industry parlance). Bender is the man who put Jacques in his current meat-suit; he’s also the one who tried to collect the bounty. Jacques forces Bender to reattach his arm but has to flee before he finds out why Bender has several tanks filled with meat-suit versions of the woman in Dash Strouthers’ visions: Dash’s beautiful, blue-haired Mizuke. As Dash’s consciousness grows stronger in Jacques’ body, the confused fugitive relies on the dead man’s piloting skills to survive on the treacherous frontier of space. As he goes, Jacques attempts to figure out his own past as a former king of the Ma’Kobi clan who retired in the midst of a conflict with an authoritarian warlord—as well as how he came to be linked with Dash Strouthers and a mysterious biosynthetic woman named Mizuke BLU.

The novel’s lore, particularly when it comes to genetic modification, is complex and jargon-heavy, but Acuff brings texture and humor to work, as well as the ability to humanize the characters, even those who aren’t recognizably human. Here a medic—who is described as looking more like a mechanic—appraises a patient: “She ain’t like us, man. She’s gentetically altercated. Total bonzai! She is stable. But inna computer terms, it’s more’n like, I dunno, sleep mode than a coma. Her skinbag is fixin’ ‘erself right up at a super high cycle, but her mind shows zippo activity.” The narrative’s DNA is at least three-quarters action movie, with scene after scene of fistfights, shootouts, explosions, and escapes. Acuff’s touch is light enough to handle the transitions between Jacques and Dash, though, and while readers will initially be pulled along by the set pieces, they will soon find themselves invested in the convoluted mystery of the protagonists’ origins. Most will return to find out what happens in the next volume.

An inventive, fast-paced SF thriller.

Pub Date: May 2, 2024

ISBN: 9798988829324

Page count: 441pp

Publisher: BravoBay Books

Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024

Battle Tides

Awards, Press & Interests

Day job

Producer-Editor at Disney

Favorite author

Mickey Spillane, Eoin Colfer, C.S. Lewis, JK Rowling, Tom Clancy, Dashiell Hammett

Favorite book

I, The Jury

Favorite line from a book

What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?

Favorite word

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

Hometown

Raleigh, NC

Passion in life

Cheeseburgers

Unexpected skill or talent

Standup Comedy

ShoutOut LA, 2024

Voyage LA, 2024

ADDITIONAL WORKS AVAILABLE

Semi-Centurion: What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Funnier!

David Acuff is a Hollywood insider, a comic, a piano recital survivor, a BMW murderer, an offensive linebacker, a dog licker, a divorced tik-tokker, a father of three Jedi Princesses and possibly a child prodigy. He is also a semi-centurion. That's a word he made up when he turned 50 this year because "quinquagenarian" sounds like a horse disease or a Menudo song. And before he could move on to the next nifty fifty, he wanted to process how he'd lived, laughed, loved and litigated along the way. So he wrote this semi-memoir. A semi-memie, let's call it. This is not a self-help book. More of a self-humor. A self-assessment after some self-reflection. Inspired by true self-fiction. It's a conundrum wrapped in an enigma, like a kitten burrito. This book was written to make God laugh so hard the Holy Spirit comes out his nose. So, if you learn a lesson or get inspired along the way, that's on you, buddy. Anyway, this hilarious exploratory trip down memory lane taught him a very provocative lesson. What doesn't kill you makes you funnier. You've been warned.
Published: April 24, 2022
ISBN: 979-8449830548

Slay Bells Ring

(Christmas Horror Comedy) It's Christmas time in Banner Elk, North Carolina. A magical time of year in a hallmark-y kinda way. Dan Helsing is a middle school math teacher there with a cat named Sméagol, no love life and a family curse that is a real pain in the neck. When a hellish portal opens under the local orphanage, Helsing must pull on his big-boy monster-slayer britches for the first and probably the last time. Rogue slayers, Hell hounds and an old school crush back in town—this is the worst Christmas ever.
Published: Nov. 6, 2022
ISBN: 9798988829300
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