A certain someone’s tried his hand at killing Jackson Cole-small-time pornographer and political pamphleteer what he been-in a Pittsburgh at the end of history and under siege of Christians from the midland states of the larger fractured landscape America as it is become-and Jackson Cole believe he is known this certain someone happen and this certain someone just so happen to be the man behind it all, aka Colby Sheffield, mayor and local hero what’s kept Pittsburgh independent all this time. And a new yellow-junk narcotic, ‘Margarine, ’ spread through the streets and on up inside the veins of Jackson’s sometime girl, Cassey Darling, and Jackson losing what friends he got left, and increasingly, he holding onto nothing but the thinnest veneer of control, while all the while, g3, Muslim female-oriented singularity run the hive state of California, lurking forever on the periphery. Imagine an AI trained on Quentin Tarantino films, William Burroughs novels, a few bits of David Ohle’s weirder surrealism, and a Pittsburgh street map is told to write a dystopian noir, and halfway through that project someone feeds in a bunch of William Gibson and Philip K. Dick, and the AI meanwhile has fleshy arms and is growing sticky and pungent and wet. And imagine this AI hands off a first draft to a wandering poet with an ear for torqued language, a lonely figure, a touch sentimental but with a bitter streak. And then this poet revises the draft while reading abstruse philosophy and accounts of mystic visions. Now speed up whatever you>re imagining, such that it becomes a propulsive hyperviolent plunge through fractured layers of perception and possibilities, ends of the world without end, the impossible tortures of the post-post, the indifference of hallucination and prophecy. Perhaps this might approach Devil, Everywhere I Look, but it’s still unlikely you will have anticipated the bears.
-Ben Segal, author of The Wes Letters and Pool Party Trap Loop