In book two of the Margarito and the Snowman trilogy, the eponymous Snowman wakes up on a desert film set in B movie director Boone Weller’s sprawling new epic, Zol. Told in a mix of melodrama, slapstick, documentary and cinema verité, and packed with drug cartels, coyotes, revolutionaries, fire-breathing dragons, human sacrifice and magic, this blockbuster unfolds in a Dalían landscape along a chimerical pan-American highway deep in the heart of Mexico as the Snowman continues his quest for a mythical place called Zol and an enigmatic friend named Margarito. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1733446125
Born out of myth and fairytale, in particular the tradition of the wise old wizard mentoring a bumbling apprentice, and told in language echoing Homer, Beowulf, biblical scripture and John Coltrane, among others, The Ironsmith evolves into a surreal Bildungsroman of a self-perceived “monster,” a painfully introverted young man whose obsession with the ancient sport of weightlifting causes him to withdraw into an increasingly delusional world that anachronistically intersects classical Greece, the Middle Ages, the Industrial Age, WWI and II, the tumultuous sixties, and the age of the Internet.
A nation buried in snow and ice in an obligatory 365 days a year Christmas celebration, a tribe of mayan warriors in comedy troupe disguise, an existentially challenged hero known as the Snowman on a quest that takes him soth of the border down ol' Mexico way, and a B-grade movie director named Boone Weller with his own agenda. Is it a book? A movie? Told in a shoot from the hip Texas style, loose, rangy, battered with an attitude, and bound to offend everybody.
"Turbo-charged lunacy, first-class wordplay, and a dangerously unhinged comic style blasts this insanely incoherent performance into the realm of the essential." (Verbivoracious)
Martin "Marty" Grasso (think Mardi Gras) wakes to find the world turned into a Dantesque "carnival of bloat." Excess consumption is patriotic, high fat and cholesterol diets are good, exercise is frowned upon, the price of fuel ticks upward by the second, and giant virtual billboards, or VRBLs, bombard citizens with advertisements for consumer products. As a mysterious vortex sucks up rapidly dwindling energy reserves and civilization faces famine, chaos and collapse, the impending catastrophe is blamed on a subversive element known as the sappers. Marty's quest for the truth intersects virtual worlds, utopian societies and ever-morphing nightmares-- in a wild vaudeville cyberpunk noir romp that crosses into the twilight zone of "sic"-fi where nothing is ever what it seems.
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