Red Moon/Red Lake

These seven interlocking stories follow the lives of four friends into a locus of nightmare — the elusive boundary that separates TV from the real world of shady streets, withering suburbs, anxious children, random murder and bizarre mutilation. It is a zone invaded by the private dialogue of impossibly cruel sitcoms, the zone known also as the American neighborhood. Here, in an unnamed coastal community, we meet the expatriated Californian, Pam; her strange brother, Rudi (dark genius, or patsy for a serial killer?); Pam's inertial husband, Ted; Pam's deranged and extended family; and Rudi's best friend, Donald Green, highway drifter and compulsive freeloader. It's a long summer of lost jobs, asinine anniversaries, strange encouters, and garrulous gossip. A summer etched by the lucid delirium which marks the frustration of untempered striving. In short, it's another creation of tremendous sensual immediacy, exploded familiarity, and haunting perversity from the authors of The Other Planet and The Menaced Assassin. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY: "[A] hallucinatory world peopled by characters so alienated that their very identities are mysteries to each other. Is Pam’s brother Rudi a serial killer? Is Rudi’s best friend, Don, really his adversary? As their exurban neighborhood is menaced by a string of bizarre murders, these young adults become unmoored; they lose their jobs, their friends and lovers, they drift into states of lethargy . . . sophisticated readers will readily exchange the charted terrains of conventional fiction for the enigmatic adventures offered here."

SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN: ". . . dialogue at once so real and so unreal that it seems like the way people might talk in dreams. The way people would talk if they were possessed by a rare intelligence. . . ."— Stephen Beachy

NEW YORK PRESS: A mysterious "novel-in-stories": "Some of the most stylish ‘post-modern fiction’ there is." —John Strausbaugh