Roach Rage

Antonio "Tony" Padillo has dealt with demanding kitchen shifts, Atlanta traffic, difficult customers, tight budgets, and the ordinary irritations of married life. But nothing prepares him for the enemy that takes over his apartment on Buford Highway.

Cockroaches.

At first, Tony treats the infestation like any other household problem. He sprays, fogs, seals cracks, sets traps, and declares victory. The roaches disagree. They return in greater numbers, turning up in the kitchen, the bathroom, the television, his shoes, and eventually almost everywhere Tony looks.

What begins as pest control soon becomes an obsession.

Tony starts studying the insects. He records their movements, draws maps, tests their reactions to bait, and becomes convinced they are not behaving randomly. There are patterns. Routes. Tactics. Perhaps even a chain of command.

Then General Cucaracha appears.

Cigar-smoking, uniformed, belligerent and impossibly confident, the leader of the Republic of Roaches declares war on Tony, whom the insect army names El Exterminador. Whether the General is real, imagined, or the product of an exhausted mind becomes increasingly difficult even for Tony to decide.

While Carmen watches her husband become consumed by his private war, Tony's strange behavior begins spilling into the rest of his life. His coworkers notice. His neighbors complain. His social life shrinks. Every ordinary encounter becomes further evidence that the enemy is watching, adapting and waiting for him to make a mistake.

Tony responds with bigger traps, stranger defenses, cereal-box bunkers, improvised weapons, attempted diplomacy and increasingly outrageous military operations. The roaches respond by refusing to surrender.

Soon the battle inside Tony's apartment becomes a battle inside Tony himself.

By the time peanut butter, a hairdryer and a gas stove become part of his final strategy, pest control has given way to disaster. Firefighters arrive. Police follow. Tony is taken for psychiatric evaluation, leaving behind a damaged kitchen, an exhausted wife and a cockroach army that may never have existed anywhere except in his mind.

But when Tony begins recovering and life slowly returns to normal, one troubling question remains.

If General Cucaracha was only a hallucination...

why does a cockroach in the hospital appear to be wearing a tiny medal?

Roach Rage is a fast-moving comic novel about obsession, marriage, pride, exhaustion and one stubborn man's spectacularly disastrous refusal to let a household pest have the last word.