The Revisionaries
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"A modern-day classic."—Ron Charles, Washington Post
“A spectacular invention.”—The New York Times
"Compulsively readable."—NPR
Things do not bode well for Father Julius. . . A street preacher decked out in denim robes and running shoes, Julius is a source of inspiration for a community that knows nothing of his scandalous origins.
But when a nearby mental hospital releases its patients to run amok in his neighborhood, his trusted if bedraggled flock turns expectantly to Julius to find out what’s going on. Amid the descending chaos,
Julius encounters a hospital escapee who babbles prophecies of doom, and the growing palpable sense of impending danger intensifies . . . as does the feeling that everyone may be relying on a street preacher just a little too much.
Still, Julius decides he must confront the forces that threaten his congregation—including the peculiar followers of a religious cult, the mysterious men and women dressed all in red seen fleetingly amid the bedlam, and an enigmatic smoking figure who seems to know what’s going to happen just before it does.
The Revisionaries is a wildly imaginative, masterfully rendered, and suspenseful tale that conjures the bold outlandish stylishness of Thomas Pynchon, Margaret Atwood, and Alan Moore—while being unlike anything that’s come before.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Moxon's antic debut starts off anchored in a particular, if fantastic, place and time, and then dissolves into a less than coherent dissertation on authorship and free will. The first section is set in an inner-city neighborhood of an unnamed industrial city. Here the life of a street preacher with a mysterious source of funding intersects with those of a gang leader, an addled man searching for his son, a young man whose physical form is intermittently perceptible by the people he's with, a bunch of red-clad ninjas, and the "loonies" newly released from the local mental institution and hopped up on amphetamines. The novel then jumps to an alternative history of Pigeon Forge, Tenn., from the 19th century up to the present, in which a lottery ticket and a fountain dispensing water with amnesiac properties figure prominently. Back in the city, it becomes evident that these characters are the creations of one or more authors, and may in fact be comic book cats. Even at more than 600 pages, the novel's plot and characters remain curiously undeveloped, and the barrage of verbiage, on subjects such as the properties of the first 10 dimensions of existence, often spins in circles. Even the most patient readers may wish for things to speed up.
