Benjamin
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- 19,99 €
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- 19,99 €
Publisher Description
IN ONE L.A. MOTEL ROOM, A COSMIC QUEST IS ABOUT TO BEGIN . . .
More than just a writer, more than just a science-fiction icon, Benjamin J. Carp was a cultural revolutionary. Over the course of 44 novels and hundreds of short stories—including the counterculture classic The Man They Couldn’t Erase—Carp pushed the boundaries of literary respectability for the sci-fi genre and his readers’ perception of reality itself . . . until decades of amphetamine abuse and Southern California excess finally ended a mind-bending career that always just escaped mainstream success. He died in 1982.
Until 2025 . . . when Benjamin J. Carp awakens, alive, in a burned-out motel on the fringes of Los Angeles. He remembers dying. He knows he shouldn’t exist. Is he a dream? A robot? A ghost? A clone? A simulation? In his own time, Carp pondered all of these scenarios through his fiction—and now, as he treks from Studio City to Venice Beach and onward into the paranoid sprawl of 21st-century Los Angeles, he will be called to investigate his greatest mystery yet: himself.
From Edgar Award nominee and Philip K. Dick Award winner Ben H. Winters (EC’s Cruel Universe, The Last Policeman trilogy) and rising star Leomacs (EC’s Epitaphs from the Abyss, Ghostlore) comes a uniquely fascinating and hilariously deranged excursion into the metatextual nexus where existence and oblivion, past and future, genius and madness, and glitter and grim reality all meet just beyond Hollywood Boulevard.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Authorial arrogance gets a hilarious thwacking in this twisty mind-bender from novelist Winters (Underground Airlines) and Italian cartoonist Leomacs. Benjamin J. Carp, a science fiction writer with a cult following (though he hates that term), wakes up in a motel room with no memory of how he got there. The real problem, according to nerdy motel clerk Marcus Dingle, who becomes his unwilling "amanuensis," is not Carp's bad memory but the fact that he actually died years ago. This revelation kicks off a chaotic investigation, which largely involves Carp barreling around town with Dingle in tow and spouting off one theory after another about what might have happened. A self-proclaimed hero with an exaggerated sense of his own importance, he assumes he's a true "man of consequence... a sort of Jesus figure." Winters revels in the sci-fi-mystery mash-up, coding Carp as a Philip K. Dick type, complete with beard, schlubby attire, and days lost to amphetamine-fueled writing jags. Though some of the third act plot points draw too heavily from Groundhog Day and A Christmas Carol, the madcap spirit and Leomacs's jaunty artwork more than compensate. Readers will have fun with this fast-paced, smart, and self-aware caper.
