Bøger af Will Viharo

Lounge lizard. International man of misery. Space cadet. Dog walker. Lover. Loner. Fighter. Fool. Vic Valentine has been all of these things and more, and less-much less. These fourteen torrid tales of forbidden love, shameless lust, surrealistic horror, existential mystery, pointless mayhem, and just plain stupidity spanning Vic's entire pathetic life collectively illuminate the darkest corners of the human condition, without revealing a single god damn truth, other than we're all lonely globs of ephemeral flesh wandering aimlessly around a big ball of shit hanging by a thread in a vast, apathetic void. Welcome to the hypnotic, erotic, neurotic world of Vic Valentine, Private Eye.

THE VIC VALENTINE CLASSIC CASE FILES collects for the first time in a single definitive edition the four novels between Love Stories Are Too Violent For Me and Hard-boiled Heart, all written in the mid-1990s, published by the author himself in 2011, and now available in this official anthology: Fate Is My Pimp, Romance Takes a Rain Check, I Lost My Heart in Hollywood, and Diary of a Dick, plus a new short story, "Brain Mistrust." From an Elvis-themed sex cult involving a missing Mob brat, to a sordid rendezvous with a homicidal high school sweetheart, to a real live B movie road trip, to a series of lusty liaisons with the wild women of the detective's promiscuous past, there are no experiences or encounters like these anywhere in genre fiction, all related to the reader in our hapless hero's intrepid, introspective, shamelessly self-centered voice. Welcome to the wild, wondrous, wacky and woeful world of Vic Valentine, Private Eye. Praise for the Vic Valentine series: "Valentine, with his bottom-feeding clientele and penchant for exploring the underworld's weirdest fringes, is like a West Coast cousin to the late, great Charles Willeford's serial detective Hoke Mosely (Miami Blues). As always, Viharo's pulp fiction prose rockets the reader through Valentine's adventures and as the pages turn, the author's encyclopedic knowledge and adoration of pop culture's kitschiest corners elicits gut-bursts of laughter." -Pete Crooks, author of The Setup: A True Story of Dirty Cops, Soccer Moms, and Reality TV "Will Viharo writes not just neo-noir but neon noir, his Vic Valentine novels brilliant paeans to Chandler, Hammett, and other aspects of pop culture that Viharo clearly loves, from old B-movies to Frank Sinatra. But his roots are only a backdrop for Viharo's modernization of the detective genre. Vic Valentine is a detective who falls hard for his dreams, knowing full well that he shouldn't. For Valentine it seems that the greatest defeat would be to give in to the idea that he cannot win. In Will Viharo's fast paced, witty and wise Vic Valentine novels, there is always hope, however hardboiled it may be."-Rob Pierce, author of Uncle Dust and The Things I Love Will Kill Me Yet

IT CAME FROM HANGAR 18 is the most action-packed, erotic science fiction epic since The Bible, but with even more sex and violence. IT mixes hardcore sex with hard science, conspiracy theories with conspicuous satire, mythological monsters with mutated mobsters, flesh-eating feminists with voyeuristic vampires, and creates a potent literary Tiki cocktail pulsating with pulp, planets, pulchritude, politics, and a plethora of other "p" words. This is essential end-of-the-world desert-island flashlight-under-the-covers reading, the ultimate B movie in literary form, and the most tantalizing textbook in the annals of anarchic academia.

THE SPACE NEEDLER'S INTERGALACTIC BAR GUIDE smoothly mixes a wide variety of choice ingredients including retro-futurism, vintage pulp, Space Age culture, mid-century modernism, speculative sci-fi, real rocket science, cosmic consciousness, amorous aliens, universal social issues, and both original and classic cocktail recipes into a soul-shaking, brain-quaking literary blend that will challenge the very nature of existence and forever alter all previous perceptions of reality!

Vic Valentine, Private Eye is back in business-as a dog walker. A really, really bad one. While drunk in a dive bar one rainy Seattle night, one of his canine clients tied up outside goes missing. The twisted trail leads him from Vancouver to Minneapolis to Houston to Mexico City and then all the way down to Costa Rica. Along the way he encounters nefarious businessmen, dangerous drug dealers, tropical cocktails, flesh-eating zombies, voracious vampire women, and a luscious Latina bombshell that may or may not turn out to be the long lost love of his life... Join Vic in his frantic search for the missing pooch, exotic sexual escapades, voluptuous voodoo vengeance, and a quest for the meaning of Life in a dog-eat-dog world.

Vic Valentine is lost inside the space between his ears. His lifelong slow-burning mental meltdown, sexual obsessiveness, fatal self-absorption, and epic existential angst have resulted in a complete break from conventional external reality. Now convinced his entire life is a movie, he finds himself trapped on Planet Thrillville, encountering voluptuous alien femme fatales, mutated monsters, intergalactic gangsters, his own unleashed demons, and his arch nemesis, "Will the Thrill," the evil overlord of Vic's own alternative internal universe. Not exactly noir. Not exactly horror. Not exactly science fiction. Not even a story, really. This is a psychotic, psychotronic journey you experience, not merely read.

SEX AND DEATH. The visceral impact of these simple words never fails to elicit a strong response in all peoples across every society and culture. Together these inevitable experiences constitute the core of the human condition, the essence of our shared existence, and yet they create conflict, chaos and confusion amongst us. The inherent fear and ignorance of our own corporeal realities results in religious oppression, tribalistic warfare, political scandal, corporate exploitation, and artistic censorship. Not here. These titillating tales of erotic, existential terror are cinematic fever dreams in literary form, individually and collectively conveying the delirious desire that overwhelms our senses and the deep dread that undermines our spirits when confronted with the seemingly contradictory but essentially complementary twin fates of mating and mortality. There is only one entrance and one exit in this brief, beautiful, horrific cycle of precious, ephemeral Flesh. Welcome to the uniquely stylized, conceptually uncompromising world of VIHORROR.

Things I Do When I'm Awake is erotic horror noir distilled into a surrealistic mood piece, a series of confessional prose poems that are psychologically complex, sensually stimulating, and emotionally challenging, collectively conveying a seductive nightmare that will haunt your dreams forever.

The Thrillville Pulp Fiction Collection is a series of "double features" reprinting the best work of underground literary legend Will Viharo in definitive editions. Volume Three: Chumpy Walnut and Selected Short Stories provides a revealing, entertaining look at the author's seminal works while creatively chronicling his artistic evolution, his very first novel being a unique, charming, nostalgic fable suitable for all ages, the remaining assortment of tales wildly ranging in tone and content from bleak to bizarre, from whimsical to wanton, but always stubbornly original. "(Chumpy Walnut) is my favorite tome in the Viharo oeuvre. Anyone can relate, 'cause we've all got a little Chumpy in all of us." -Eddie Muller, Czar of Noir, author of Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir, The Art of Noir, and The Distance

MY VOODOO VALENTINE? Vic Valentine has finally retired from the private eye racket. And since his beautiful new bi-sexual, black-belt burlesque-dancer bride, Ava Margarita Valentina Valdez Valentine, who may also be a witch or a vampire or both, has a mysterious and possibly nefarious source of seemingly endless wealth, he no longer walks dogs for income, either. Vic is finally living the life of his wildest dreams! Until the Universe sucker-punches him yet again, and it suddenly melts into a noir nightmare... First a Yakuza hitman from Mrs. Valentine's past shows up in Seattle with a score to settle. She conures demons from another dimension to not only protect them, but spice up their sex life, too (or hers, anyway). The ghost of Vic's dead friend Doc Schlock still haunts him, literally. His old pal Ivar the sailor statue starts talking, and walking. And then there's that doppelgänger of a young Vic suddenly popping up here and there around town, setting Vic up for a showdown with his younger self. But no matter what happens next, the show must go on.

The Thrillville Pulp Fiction Collection is a series of "double features" reprinting the best work of underground literary legend Will Viharo in definitive editions. Volume Two: Lavender Blonde (a novel in dialogue) and the satirical crime thriller Down a Dark Alley present a dual dose of extremely graphic, uniquely compelling noir, loaded with more sordid sex and vicious violence than any fifty exploitation films, but also equipped with a stylistic complexity, emotional resonance and psychological depth absent from routine pulp fare. "No human being has absorbed more pulp culture and its seamy sexploitation underbelly than Will Viharo. Thankfully, his warped synapses and calloused, compulsive fingertips are able to repurpose it all and blow it back onto the page-desperate, demented, delirious, D-cupped ... and many other D words as well." -Eddie Muller, Czar of Noir, author of Dark City Dames, Grindhouse: the Forbidden World of "Adults Only" Cinema, and Gun Crazy: The Origin of the American Outlaw "Besides the great style, plot, and characters, what I love so much about Will Viharo's work is his willingness to really go there in his depictions of sex and violence. The dude's not shy. At all." -Mike Monson, author of Tussinland, What Happens in Reno, and The Scent of New Death

The Thrillville Pulp Fiction Collection is a series of "double features" reprinting the best work of underground literary legend Will Viharo in definitive editions.Volume One: A Mermaid Drowns in the Midnight Lounge and Freaks That Carry Your Luggage Up to the Room is the literary equivalent of a classic "grindhouse" bill: twin erotic fever dreams exploding with malevolent monsters, sexy sirens, gruesome gangsters, zeitgeist zombies, dreamy decadence, hipster hedonism, voluptuous violence, nightmarish nihilism, sensuous surrealism, pop culture potpourri, and much, much more. They are like nothing you've ever experienced."...turning into a lizard, zombies taking over the world, pornographic movie making and twists aplenty and the result is one highly intriguing, complex novel..." -review of A Mermaid Drowns in the Midnight Lounge by Keith Nixon, Big Al's Books and Pals"In a cookie-cutter literary world chock-full of imitation and repetition, Will Viharo carves out a thoroughly original ride...Think David Lynch and Raymond Chandler catching a matinee together as the world falls apart. Sexy, smart, surreal. Can't recommend enough." -Joe Clifford, author of Lamentation and Junkie Love, on A Mermaid Drowns in the Midnight Lounge"'Freaks That Carry Your Luggage Up to the Room' starts fast and hard and absolutely does not let up until the end. It's not for everyone; this is a not a book that will ever end up on Oprah's recommended reading list, but for those folks who like their fiction twisted, brutal, darkly humorous, and covered in a wide variety of bodily fluids, it's a fantastic read." -Karl Middlebrooks, Listless Ennui "Will Viharo's work certainly isn't for everyone, but if you're looking for a wildly different read that has ZERO interest in playing by the usual rules then this is for you. I have honestly never read anything quite like it. Imagine classic noir dropping a serious amount of acid and you'll get somewhere in the vicinity of the crazy-cool badassery Will is spinning here. Is he a madman, a genius or maybe a little of both? If you're so inclined, I suggest you buy a ticket, take the ride and decide for yourself." -- Greg F. Gifune, author of Savages, Blood in Electric Blue, and Velvet Elvis