spuytenduyvil

Take a walk through the nether side of the unbuilt city, along the banks of irreality, with a merry troupe of players: our friends Luis Upista, Levi Seeds, Gretchen Grimes, and of course the indefatigable Chuck Yeager. In Dead Ends Or Laughing Gas, the detective novel and spy novel collude in the spirit of noir and conspiracy theory, all within the Frenchified city of Chicago. Genres collide to open upon expansive literary vistas, two parts pulp, one part Genet, with a twist of Beckettian humor—Voila!

      Michael Slosek, author of The Blonde Notebooks and Glos

 

 

Meet Luis Upista: city dentist, laughing gas enthusiast/black market dealer of said enthusiasm, and author-or-nom-de-plume of a found diary (presented herein) documenting a giggling traveler’s socio-historical research into… what, exactly? The emptying, secret heart of the city. A killing. A discovery. The Milshire Hotel.

     Meet Kevin Kilroy: a talented spinner of spins and darkly comic ends, obsessed with alternate worlds created by intersections of word and shadowy storytelling method, equally at ease among the philosophic implications of chance events and the particulars of a really good voodoo curse.

     Dead Ends or Laughing Gas, this provocative book you’re now holding (or are you?) takes the mystery tryptic experiments of Burroughs and Berrigan to the crooked heart of noir. Positioned as a parallel text to The Escapees, Dead Ends is where it’s at: bursting with surprising characters, poetic charades, and ether blasts of drama-bitten language. Buckle up dear reading public: the event is about to begin, is beginning, has already begun!

      Andrew K. Peterson, author of Anonymous Bouquet and The Big Game is Every Night