A Room in Dodge City

A Room in Dodge City follows a nameless drifter into an American heart of darkness. In this nightmarish version of the historic Dodge City, mythic beasts crawl out of the woodwork; bizarre rituals are enacted; and death is never the end. Equal parts humor and horror-show, David Leo Rice's novel combines the mundaneness of modern life-motels, strip malls, temp jobs-with something stranger, darker, and more eternal. Told through linked vignettes that read like metaphoric fairytales gone wrong, Dodge City consumes the reader just as it slowly consumes the drifter, leaving all to wonder whether any of us can ever truly escape this world-or our own. Winner of the Electric Book Award Each chapter is fully illustrated by Christina Collins. "David Lynch meets Neil Gaiman meets Samuel Beckett and the Theater of the Absurd. Just as Dodge City is a place the narrator can never leave, Rice's book sucks you in and doesn't let you walk out of it intact, either." -Nick Antosca, author of The Girlfriend Game, Midnight Picnic, & Fires "With a draftsman's hand and a psychonaut's eye, Rice has mapped the alien precinct in which we already live. I've never encountered a book so strange yet so familiar. Writers such as William Burroughs and Samuel Delany may have helped prepare the ground, but this high-speed, controlled drift across it is all Rice's own." -Joanna Ruocco, author of Dan & A Compendium of Domestic Incidents "A vivid, precisely described nightmare filled with jokes for people who think nothing is funny anymore. Rice imagines American pop culture as a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life, and he gives us a carnival barker's tour through a disturbing landscape of lost souls, vain ambitions, and distorted identities, ultimately finding a path to redemption through the spiritual wreckage." -Mark Beauregard, author of The Whale: A Love Story "Rice cares deeply about his characters and this comes out in every vignette. He doesn't follow the nihilistic postmodern structure by declaring that life is meaningless or hopeless. What we find is the presence of hope in all things, no matter how run-down they might appear on the surface." -Joe Halstead, author of West Virginia "Dodge City is a walk on the dark side of the contemporary imagination that reworks the post-realist storytellings of Donald Barthelme or Henri Michaux into a voice that is unique. A picaresque novel for the age of the Darknet and Tor." -Simon Pummell, director of Bodysong & Identicals "In his mind-boggling debut novel, Rice conjures a series of seemingly unassuming vignettes that read like a revelatory prose poem written by the Zodiac Killer. A celebration of what it means to know that you know that you can never know everything." -Mike Kleine, author of Kanley Stubrick "Don't enter into Rice's terrifying and hilarious fictional multiverse looking for causality, continuity, or logic, as we know them. A Room in Dodge City will plunge you into a nightmarish warren-maze where somewhere, amid the numberless trapdoors, inner chambers and branching halls on branching halls, a literary orgy is going down among the imaginative intellects of Blake Butler, Kathryn Davis, Haruki Murakami, Livia Llewellyn, and Robert Coover, refereed by Cronenberg and Lynch." -Adrian Van Young, author of Shadows in Summerland & The Man Who Noticed Everything "A Room in Dodge City warps the serial format to its own uncanny ends. Briskly paced with elegantly streamlined prose, the book follows its own impeccably strange and addictive dream logic." -Jeff Jackson, author of Mira Corpora & Novi Sad "Unsettling and unsettled, reading A Room in Dodge City is like reading Jakob von Gunten's dream journal the day after he'd stayed up late to watch High Plains Drifter and Videodrome." -Gabriel Blackwell, author of Madeleine E. Find out more about Alternating Current Press at alternatingcurrentarts.com.