By the time dreadlocked and pierced Tania comes home to New Orleans to get her snake tattoo completed, the seemingly simple task has gotten more difficult than she could have ever imagined. Enter Big Marcus, a British hipster, who falls for Tania and tries to extract her from her maze of bad judgement. Yet he, too, loses his way as their lives enmesh. The unlikely pair then labor to bring a subcutaneous work of art into a world that couldn't possibly understand their obsessions. In their milieu of loonies, lovers, tattooists, transvestites and French Quarter freaks, the impossible becomes the merely improbable; the incredible, the inevitable.
Toast is an intellectual action novel--a darkly funny love story with kinship to works of Irvine Welsh, Denis Johnson, Harry Crews and John Kennedy Toole. Andrei Codrescu has placed Toast in the "new wave of one-word titled novels originating in the swamp at Baton Rouge. It's too early to say if it's a school or not but certain elements are there: unleashed gutter sexuality, over-the-top perils faced by the protagonists, disdain for psychology, and downright disrespect for authority."
