the garbageman and the prostitute

 

In some unnamed alter-America, things are getting weird: it's starting to look as though the president may be manufactured, a fat, bald old man in superhero tights rapes young girls in the ghetto, a celebrity porn star loses her mind and disappears, a serial-killing "werewolf" slaughters scores of prostitutes while the police remain baffled, mysterious mega-corporations disintegrate and vanish without a trace and gangs of street urchins announce the coming of their messiah, who will arrive in the form of a shirtless, knife-wielding, blond boy . . . meanwhile, some spectral, enigmatic force seems to pull all the strings as everyone marches blindly into an almost incomprehensible civil war.

By turns punishingly stark and wildly lyrical, grimly humorous and deadly serious, The Garbageman and the Prostitute is an eerie, genre-bending tour de force, a Menippean satire echoing the envelope-pushing pulp fiction of Philip K. Dick, Cornell Woolrich and Jim Thompson, as well as the seminal literary innovations of Franz Kafka, William Faulkner and Alain Robbe-Grillet. It is a dark, disjointed journey into the meanings of memory, madness and murder . . .

“A sad and creepy work which, like all science fiction, is really about the present. Many moving effects; much consensual and nonconsensual power exchange with alien life. Entertaining and at times haunting.”

--William T. Vollmann

 

“...A sensuous riot of language, perverse and outrageous - a wild, gonzo-porn excavation of some wicked, post-futurist landscape rendered with such scatological precision you can practically see the buildings sweat. Zack Wentz is Pynchon, Bukowski, P. K. Dick, and someone else - some huffy, undiscovered heavyweight - all swinging at once, fists knowingly trained on the reader’s sense of what’s possible in fiction.”

—Matthew Derby, author of Super Flat Times

 

 

“Dirty and alive . . .”

—Steve Aylett author of Slaughtermatic and Lint