A film scholar discovers, through his obsession with an obscure director’s B horror movies, a worldwide conspiracy to insert nihilistic subliminal messages into film. Driven by his love of the cinema, academic ambition, and increasing curiosity, he gets pulled into the world of a millennia old cult of orphans working to steer the world toward sterility and apocalypse.
Think William Gibson, Mark Danielewski, The Crying of Lot 49, and Cryptonomicon--it’s full of irresistible paranoia and worry about the place of technology in our lives and the degeneration of culture. And you have to read it before Darren Afonofsky’s (Pi, Requiem for a Dream) adaptation comes out.
House of Leaves: The Remastered Full-Color Edition
by Mark Z. Danielewski Pantheon
Our Price: $19.95
Beneath its levels and levels of narrative framing, typographic games, and hypertextual web of footnotes, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves is flat out one of the most unsettling and suspenseful haunted house stories ever written, where not just a building but space itself turns on its inhabitants. A famous photographer retires to a house in Virginia to rebuild his family only to discover that their new home is bigger on the inside than out. At first they just come home one day to find a new room, but soon a door appears in the living room wall—a door that should lead outside but instead opens into an impossible labyrinth begging to be explored. Even at 700 pages you won’t be able to put it down until you’ve ignored your classes, job, and life for days.
Seven Types of Ambiguity
by Elliot Perlman Riverhead Trade
Our Price: $16.00
“After almost two and a half years with Simon I was not the same person anymore. I had been spoiled. I had been educated. I had been programmed. After all the novels, the poetry, the music, the movies, the history, and the politics he’d fed me, I was able to anticipate his attitude to most things. […] I rarely had much to contribute that didn’t come from him. It was all derivative. […] In the couple that was us, Simon and me, I was pretty much an expendable echo, as all echoes are.”
In Seven Types of Ambiguity, Eliott Perlman brings his prodigious intelligence to bear on the ways different inequalities—in intellect, finances, ambition, world view—spark, feed, and often doom relationships. Fans of Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, and Richard Powers will love it.
