Review
“Finding James Boice has been a revelation for me. His hard-bitten prose flies off the page at you like the cracking of a machine gun, and he infuses this violent, gritty and fast-paced novel with enough subtle satire and unexpected weirdness to keep you riveted right until you flip the final page.”—Tony O’Neill, author of
Sick City and
Neon Angel“Bloody and bloody funny, James Boice’s at once coolly objective and deeply human writing does the dystopian novel like no other.
The Good and the Ghastly reads like Cormac McCarthy executing a Kurt Vonnegut premise through a Joan Didion filter. An original, in other words.”—Andrew Pyper, author of
Lost Girls and
The Killing Circle“James Boice brings the prose as hard as his characters bring the fierce in this post-apocalyptic battle story. A true original, Boice knocks it out of the park again.”—Elizabeth Crane, author of
You Must Be This Happy To Enter“James Boice’s sentences crack like hot electric bullwhips across the backs of America’s demons. By head-spinning turns arresting, violent, outraged, pointilistically detailed, tender and gut-busting hilarious,
The Good and the Ghastly dances across a dystopian future in a mash-up of genre hooliganism and the inventive glee of literary madness. A page-turning adventure like none you’ve ever taken.” —Christopher Ransom, author of
The Birthing House and
The People Next Door“
The Good and the Ghastly is the hallucinogenic fever dream of contemporary satire. Alternately brutal and lyrical, it field-dresses everyday being with poetic violence. A decidedly necessary addition to post-millennial literature.”—Darin Bradley, author of
Noise“Boice’s book is like a literary Magic 8-Ball. Ask it questions, shake it up, and watch the novel’s playful, hilarious, and terrifying hallucination of our future. From one smuck-up to another, you’ll be hooked by the beautiful beating heart propelling this romp’s incredible energy.”—Joshua Mohr, author of
Termite Parade“James Boice’s tale of the fearsome future—and the life of a sadistic striver named Junior Alvarez—is harrowing, heinous, and brilliantly imagined. Boice writes with jagged energy and a rollicking dark wit. From the opening lines, his story pulls like a train.”—Lew McCreary, author of
The Minus Man
From the Author
Hello,
In the fall of 2005, I was 23 and living in Somerville, Massachusetts. Gritty, rusty place across the river from Boston. I was working at a gas station in the neighborhood. The men and women who came in to fill up or just shoot the bull were marginal Irish and Italian criminal types from their own time and place. Oldsmobiles, gambling problems, yellow teeth. My first two novels,
MVP and
NoVA, were finished and on their way toward publication. I was watching everything, drinking everything in, thinking about my next book. I had a feeling it was going to be sprawling and weird.
Whitey Bulger was in the news. The legendary, mythical, brutal Irish gangster who had ruled the Boston underworld for 30 years. He had been on the lam since the 1990s, after being indicted for 30 murders. He was on the FBI's Five Most Wanted list. His former headquarters were in an auto garage down the street from me. This was where he used to strangle people and tear out their teeth while at the same time letting South Boston believe he was their guardian and protector. The customers at the gas station all had stories about the good ol' days under Whitey, the bloodbaths of the gang wars out of which he came to power. My imagination took off. I wanted to write about an outlaw, a criminal. I could relate to what it must feel like. I wanted to write about a person who is pathologically set on manifesting his will and living life how he wants. I almost always write about such people. That is what Americans are.
This was early in the second term of George W. Bush's illegal, bloodthirsty, empirical presidency. Bulger was free, Bush had been reelected: A stink was in the air. Doom. The ghastly were ruling the earth. I wanted to express everything I felt about the state of the world into the next novel.
So inspired by, among other things, my favorite writers--David Foster Wallace, William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Don Delillo, and William Shakespeare--I set off on what would become
The Good and the Ghastly. I wrote the first draft on a typewriter and by hand, which is what I have done since I was a child, liking the limitations it places upon me and the spontaneity it encourages. I compiled a massive endless mountain of pages. I broke my typewriter writing it. I could not turn my brain off. Nor could I keep working at the gas station--I found something easier on my faculties: assisting a forensic psychiatrist in work related to pharmaceutically-induced suicide and murder.
I set the story in the future, in Northern Virginia. That is where I am from. I grew up in the town of Centreville, where Junior Alvarez grows up 1,000 years from now. Where our nation and our species is headed is always a primary concern of mine, as I imagine it is for many. If I could not turn my brain off before, I definitely could not once I set the novel after man blew the world up and almost annihilated himself.
Several years and 1,200 pages later, the book was done. I printed it out, sent it to my agent in a great big box that must have looked like a mail bomb, and ran off to Iceland. The big ugly thing then haunted my editor's office and nightmares for years while my first two novels were published. He did not know what to tell me. He did not even know where to begin. In the end, he had to send it back. He had to. If he had not, he would have suffered a breakdown. By then it was 2009 and enough time had passed and enough had changed in my life and in the country and in the culture to give me the emotional distance necessary to do some serious surgery. Big sprawling weird kaleidoscopic novels were not as exciting to me as they were when I began the book. I took one glance at it and saw exactly what needed to be done. I cut the hell out of it, down to the heart of the matter. I threw out three quarters. Then I rewrote it top to bottom over the course of a year. It became a very basic simple story about ambition and suffering and the human will that I feel and hope is and always will be relevant and interesting and true. I have lived with this novel--thinking about it, tending it, crafting it, writing and rewriting it over and over--for more than five years. In so doing, my writing has matured in drastic measure, taken a great big step up and forward from my first two novels that now, having written this book, I cannot even look at.
The Good and the Ghastly is the best thing I have ever written.
I very much hope you enjoy it.
Thanks for reading,
James Boice
New York
