Down and Out in Purgatory
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- £5.49
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- £5.49
Publisher Description
Twenty pulse-pounding, mind-bending tales of science fiction, twisted metaphysics, and supernatural wonder from the two-time World Fantasy and Philip K. Dick Award winning author of The Anubis Gates and On Stranger Tides.
A complete palette of story-telling colors from Powers, including acclaimed tale “The Bible Repairman,” where a psychic handyman supernaturally eliminates troublesome passages of the Bible for paying clients finds the remains of his own broken soul on the line when tasked with rescuing the kidnapped ghost of a rich man’s daughter. Time travel takes a savage twist in “Salvage and Demolition,” where the chance discovery of a long-lost manuscript throws a down-and-out book collector back in time to 1950s San Francisco where he must prevent an ancient Sumeric inscription from dooming millions in the future. Humor and horror mix in “Sufficient unto the Day,” when a raucous Thanksgiving feast takes a dark turn as the invited ghosts of relatives past accidentally draw soul-stealing demons into the family television set. And obsession and vengeance survive on the other side of death in “Down and Out in Purgatory,” where the soul of a man lusting for revenge attempts to eternally eliminate the killer who murdered the love of his life. Wide-ranging, wonder-inducing, mind-bending—these and other tales make up the complete shorter works of a modern-day master of science fiction and fantasy.
At the publisher’s request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This bite-size horror-comedy is toothsome, if not as satisfying as some of Powers's longer works. Tom Holbrook hopes to find and take revenge on murderer John Atwater, who killed Holbrook's beloved, Shasta DiMaio. He's temporarily stymied when Atwater turns up dead. Still bent on vengeance, Holbrook asks sorcerer Martinez how to destroy a ghost. Descending into a purgatorial half-world of sexually aggressive phantoms and mentally shattered spirits, Holbrook continues hunting for Atwater, but his quest leads him to truths that shatter even dead hearts. Powers's scathing wit fingers the misanthropic core of the human condition. His comedy of terrors barrages readers with the speed and calculated ridiculousness of a Looney Tunes cartoon. Powers (Medusa's Web) crafts intimately defined characters who prevent this march through the Inferno from becoming too absurd. Moral, bodily, and spiritual isolation create uneasy friction between mishaps, and minimalist prose whips the plot along.
