Bøger af Rob Benvie

A howl into the void, a ghost story, and a bit of a metaphysical hellride.A misanthropic ghostwriter roams an island off the Kenyan coast. An Arizona teenager awaits the next stage in a secretive covenant. A renowned poet retraces her past amid a baffling netherworld. An international arms dealer's son drifts through time, atoning for the death of the man he loved.For readers who take their contemporary fiction with a tinge of the otherworldly, Bleeding Light is about mystical experiences, the symbolic fabric connecting us all, and desperate people seeking affirmationthrough religious, cosmic, chemical and other meansof a world beyond their own. It's a grimly funny and often trippy take on transcendence in a hypercommodified age."e;A darkly gleaming marvel. Searing, creepy and mysticalas if Don DeLillo had set out to steal Paulo Coelho's flock."e;Sean Michaels, Scotiabank Giller Prize winner and author of The Wagers

"e;A great novel that captures the loneliness and absurdity of the 1990s suburban experience. Dense and imaginative writing that often borders on the uncomfortable, but the edge of your seat is the best place to be."e;Joel Plaskett It is the summer of 1999, and the Sweltham family is leading an ordinary suburban existence. Former childhood volleyball champ Parker crisscrosses the continent as a sales rep for DynaFlex Sporting Goods, while his wife, Trixie, serves as the managing editor of Record of Truth, an unsuccessful journal for genocide studies. Their son Owen has just returned from juvenile prison to the vast horrors of high school. Heath, Parker's brother, has vowed to cut down on the weed and fried chicken for a regimen of self-improvement, obeying his AbDestroyer routine and crafting a screenplay that will dismantle the universe. All appears normal. Yet in the summer's swelter, as Y2K anxiety grows, grim truths are revealed. Trixie is rocked by the discovery of an undiagnosable cerebral defect, rendering her toils at the journal trivial. Cataloging crunches and ignoring his Gulf War vet ex-girlfriend, Heath fights to reconcile confusions of the past with hopes for a meaningful future. Owen's religious fixations feed his Robitussin binges and fantasies of self-destruction. And while peddling his wares at the annual Empowerment Expo, Parker forges an uneasy friendship with Adam, an African political refugee harboring his own violent aspirations. Sprawling yet scalpel-sharp, Maintenance, like some twenty-first-century White Noise, takes the suburbs to a geography you won't quite recognize. Rob Benvie has recorded and performed with the rock bands Thrush Hermit, Camouflage Nights, and The Dears. He is the author of the novel Safety of War.

David spends his days as an underworked copy writer for an ad agency and his nights lost in old war movies, fantasizing about his strange teenage cousin and revisiting his father's suicide.His dreary life is upended when he finds himself at the mysterious Chaos Farm, a lavish wilderness retreat populated by those seeking to right their lives' imbalances through New Age games and rites of necromancy. In a paranormal experiment gone awry, they inadvertently raise a mysterious bloodthirsty creature that may be a) the Devil, b) David's deceased father, c) George C. Scott as General George S. Patton in the movie Patton, or d) all, or any, of the aforementioned. Carnage ensues, leading David through a woozy landscape of churning highways, deserted shopping malls and small towns, lured backward through the chasms of memory and nostalgia by the monster's coaxing squeals and forward toward an uncertain, hallucinatory future.Here, Lolita meets Maldoror meets 50s pulp horror comics. Safety of War is a hellride of exploded symbolism and beery misadventures, murders and tragedies, laughs, puzzles and meditations on valour and sacrifice in a world short on true heroes.