Search Worlds Without End

From the author of the legendary MOTORMAN come two twined novellas--BOONS and THE CAMP. BOONS, co-written with an eccentric and anonymous South African professor of entomology, deals with the cultivation of half-bird half-simian creatures called Boons. The professor travels the world in his search for a Boon he can mate with, perhaps love, and finds Ruthie, the object of his dreams and the subject of his oddball experiments. THE CAMP takes place around a provincial mill that spins sheep's wool into theatrical and Santa beards. In the mill camp, workers live in brutal poverty under Mr. Ganzfeld, a cruelly whimsical boss who lost his nose in a lightning strike and will commit any depredation to find a "real" replacement, including murder.

Table of Contents

• Boons
• The Camp

Building the pedway so that everyone had access was a marvel of engineering. Yet no one knew who the engineers or builders were. They were lost to history. Though it was assumed that somewhere there must have been a central power source, perhaps in an underground facility with dynamos and belts and enormous gears, it had never been located.

Three short novels by the author of the cult classic Motorman

COTTAGE INDUSTRY

A bloody family drama about the bastard child of Charles Manson

After aiding in the murder of his aunt, Charles Manson's illegitimate son starts his own home euthanasia business. Frequently interrupted by a PBS radio broadcast on American culture, Junior and Lorna capitalize on the population's desire to end the suffering of their family members with quick and painless death while living in their parents' basement. As the business grows, so does Junior's love for the job.

WIND WAGON

An absurdist western for the screen

After killing a gold prospector, shooting his own foot with a rifle, and killing a smithy, Howard Dewey sits in a jail cell, marking his time on the wall with lampblack, watching crickets copulate, sticking pill bugs in his ears, and memorizing the Bible. While Dewey's beard grows longer, his failed partner in crime, Jonah, settles down on a worthless homestead to farm prairie dogs with his mail-order bride from Kansas City. A baby boy is born to them, four months premature with a birthmark the shape of a vestigial third eye. Meanwhile, her entire family put in the ground by Dewey and Jonah, Miss Katie Binder, a woman with the power to heal all addictions, waits in an empty house for the legendary wind wagon to come tearing across the desert.

THE DEVIL IN KANSAS

Philip K. Dick meets the Cohen Brothers

After Sherry lights her house on fire with her motocross star husband trapped inside, she sets out on a road trip with her seventeen-year-old son, Joey - a talented musical saw player - across the country and into a bizarre alternate universe called Witchy Toe, which Joey has previously visited. Like Terry Gilliam's Brazil or the corporate world of Kafka, the rules in this alien city change daily, on the whims of unseen masters. As they struggle to survive in this strange new world, Sherry's not-quite-dead husband sets out on a slaughtering rampage from Colorado to the heart of Texas.

Moldenke is sent to the "free" prison town at Altobello with an indeterminate sentence. He has a rare bowel condition. Altobello is full of "Jellyheads" and features an old nuclear reactor on the edge of town. No one seems to remember what the reactor really is, until it's almost too late.

The Pisstown Chaos is a novel about disease and forced-relocation. Political power seems to be solely in the hands of one Reverend Herman Hooker, an "American Divine" who revels in the peoples' suffering as they are "shifted" (separated from — and then randomly coupled with — one another) by decree every five years. There are up-shifts, down-shifts, and side-shifts, but no attempt to make harmonious pairings. Chaos rages on as parasitic infestations spread and the Reverend rules with an iron fist from his Templex headquarters, spouting platitudes to the ever-moving masses.

MOTORMAN is a central work, pulsing with mythology, created by a craftsman of language who was seemingly channeling the history of narrative when he wrote it. It is a book about the future that comes from the past, and we are caught in its amazing middle. To read MOTORMAN now is to encouter proof that a book can be both emotional and eccentric, smeared with humanity and artistically ambitious, messy with grief and dazzling with spectacle.

The Age of Sinatra is the long-awaited sequel to the 1972 sci-fi cult classic Motorman. Part political allegory, part science-fiction dystopia, the world David Ohle creates is disturbing, humorous, and oddly compelling. The novel catches up with the luckless protagonist Moldenke, after the most recent "Forgetting." Moldenke finds himself in possession only of his name and the bare facts of his former life while he cruises on the Titanic through an alternate reality where elective deformation is a fashion trend and grasshoppers are the main course. His travel mates are Ophelia Balls, an artist; Gerald Hilter, a journalist; Agnes Moldenke, his mother and the inventor of edible money; Dr. Burnheart, his old mentor; and a talkative neutrodyne named Hugo Vink.