from the back of the book :
If there’s a line between the real and the digital, between meat and the game, between past and present, then hold this book close to your mouth and whisper it into the pages. Please. Maybe the kid in there’ll hear you. His name is Nolan Dugatti. He’s lost, see, running down hall after hall, something both ancient and not-yet born galloping up behind him on a hundred legs, each individual footfall a sound he knows, a way of shuffling that he’s always known. His father? Except it can’t be. Unless of course this is another novel from Stephen Graham Jones. Not quite horror, not quite science fiction, but like his ?ve or six other books, a story trembling at some pupal stage between meat and the game, where words will sometimes stop their crawl across the page and crane their neck around at the sky, nod about what they see there-you- then unfold their wings, drift up into another world altogether.
REVIEWS: Lorin Dearing | FanFiAddict |
Two unreliable narrators, a bunch of suicide letters, and a plot that collapses on itself just like the characters do — Stephen Graham Jones is our contemporary Jorge Luis Borges.
— Michael Kimball, author of Dear Everybody
Stephen Graham Jones’s novel The Bird is Gone was the most brilliantly original book I’d read in years, but Nolan Dugatti may top it. Like Lethem and Murukami before him, Jones mines his genre fiction past to bring us a work of startling literary merit. Mystery, horror, sci-fi: the ingredients are all in there, and the chef — as confident and creative as ever — knows exactly what he’s doing.”
— David Goodwillie, author of Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time
Suicide notes from a father who can’t quite manage to kill himself, the nine final hours of customer support at a help desk for a video game no one has played in almost a decade, train-length, time-traveling, hyper-adaptive super-centipedes, lethal shrimp cocktails, ninjas (blind and otherwise), and a posthumous Pong match all cryptically connect in this stark exploration of guilt, grief, and fear by the prolific Stephen Graham Jones. And did I mention that it’s funny? Unplug your consoles, kids, and play this book.
— Zack Wentz, author of The Garbageman and the Prostitute
Stephen Graham Jones has one of the most restless and individual imaginations in American writing today. This strange, subtle story of father-son disaffection and disjointed love is told with his signature narrative inventiveness and dark humor. It moves forward with a gently predatory Kafkaesque logic that will draw you in and leave you remembering other lives, while wondering more about the one you call your own.
— Kris Saknussemm, author of Zanesville
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InDenverTimes
Not sure if this is scripted or not—how could it not be?—but, profanity aside, it could pretty much be a trailer for Nolan Dugatti:
While this is a Gary Larson Nolan’s dad would key on pretty well, I suspect:
