Book Description

“Futurist wunderkind Womack concludes his heralded Ambient series with this intriguing, clever novel set in an alternate, semi-historical 1968” (Publishers Weekly). It’s 1968, and Walter Bullitt, part-time US government freelancer and collector of “race records,” stays busy testing new psychotropics on himself and unsuspecting citizens. Walter’s conscience never interferes with his work—until he’s asked to help sabotage Bobby Kennedy’s presidential campaign. The ghosts who’ve moved into his apartment aren’t much comfort. Then two outré femmes fatales show up and frog-march Walter out of Max’s Kansas City before the Velvet Underground can finish their first song. The ladies have a mission. They need to save New York—both his and theirs. Bringing his acclaimed Ambient series to a close, “Womack has crafted a fast-moving, hipper-than-hip science fiction novel meshing the exuberant wordplay of Anthony Burgess with the high-concept what-if history Philip Dick made famous with The Man in the High Castle” (Publishers Weekly). “A bizarre mating of William S. Burroughs and Robert Heinlein, though the over-the-top, hipster, first-person narration might also make readers think of Jack Kerouac channeled through P. G. Wodehouse.” —The Oregonian “Like Damon Runyon and James M. Cain, Jack Womack has a gift for inventing oddball language. . . . Daringly, scaringly distinct in contemporary fiction.” —Philadelphia Weekly “The action moves with amphetamine quickness, and Womack’s surefooted control over his material completely sucks us in. . . . Has roots in the paranoid, conspiratorial bookends of Norman Mailer’s near-delirious An American Dream and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.” —Bookforum