From Publishers Weekly
Standaert's unconventional first novel follows Pisco, a disillusioned rodent exterminator and taxidermy enthusiast. The main thrust of Pisco's life is spent killing bats and rats, attempting to coexist with a ragtag assembly of neighbors and lamenting the tragic death of his apartment building's handyman Paul Putty. Pisco's unhinged, naturally suspicious mother (who calls him by his given name, "Moses") is a black Jamaican woman who adopted him; she and her much younger boyfriend, "Fly Boy," add little to his life of joyless annoyances, the zaniness of which is mind-bogglingly excessive: Pisco is bitten by a bat and develops rabies-like symptoms, he's fired then beaten down after vomiting on his boss' shoes, he wrestles emotionally with being an adoptee, then finds his friend Father John dead after a night of drinking and winds up in jail accused of murder (and is then rescued by a great flood)-all while corresponding with a gal named Sarah Ellen Roberts who may or may not be his niece. The author of Skipping Towards Armageddon: The Politics and Propaganda of the Left Behind Novels and the LaHaye Empire (Soft Skull) and a blogger at the Huffington Post, Standaert targets the soulless options for 21st century living in this frenetic, bitterly funny paean to defeat.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Product Description
Some say a hero will come to save the world from destruction, hopelessness and haywire weather; from powerful forces of evil -- political, spiritual, or perhaps personal. Is The Pisco Kid that hero, or merely a literary instrument satirically skewering rapture-theorist conservatives, libidinous liberals, and many groups in between? In a surreal post-flood fantasy-scape, maybe it'ss all a wash.
