Fiction. After crossing a vast inland sea in an ark called ANGEL HOUSE, Professor Squimbop docks on a distant shore. As soon as his anchor makes purchase, a town sprouts up that may or may not encapsulate all of existence. At the behest of some distant master, he embarks into this town to teach the children about death, a concept they've never encountered before. What follows is a surreal epic about friendship, childhood, solitude, creation, and the darkest realms of obsessive nostalgia. Both tender and depraved, familiar and bizarre, it is an utterly original coming-of-age story that questions how we can establish a shared reality when meaning was, is, and will always be malleable. "David Leo Rice's ANGEL HOUSE is a haunting novel—brave, astute, and strange in all the best ways. I highly recommend it!"—Brandon Hobson "Early in ANGEL HOUSE, one of the characters thinks 'As soon as one thing becomes uncanny, everything else follows,' and, in this novel where everything is at once familiar and deeply strange, you would do well to heed those words. If you like the idea of Marwencol as scripted by Daniel Paul Schreber with punch-up by Ben Marcus, this is the book for you."—Gabriel Blackwell "Videotapes that create portals to other worlds, children levitated by a radio announcer's voice, and a decaying town where women are a hazy memory—that's just the set-up for David Leo Rice's engrossing ANGEL HOUSE. This fantastical novel unravels expectations on every page, while the stories it tells about identity, memory, and community begin to feel hauntingly familiar."—Jeff Jackson "David Leo Rice's ANGEL HOUSE could be described as the story of one year in the life of an isolated town, and the dreams and frustrations of its conflicted residents. But that might not be entirely accurate, because it's also a headfuck of utterly monumental proportions—think endlessly transforming bodies, bifurcated consciousnesses, sinister entities transcending time and space, and terrifying bear-people. If Julio Cortazár wrote cosmic horror, it might look somethinglike this."—Tobias Carroll "Lash yourself to the mast of your ark as you set sail for the siren song of David Leo Rice's imagination. Make anyone else on deck promise to bind you tighter the more you beg for release. In all the angel-towns you've ever haunted on all the demon-shores you've ever died, the only map that matters is the one Rice has written. The emerging cult novelist of today's moment, he's the reigning surrealist sorcerer of tomorrow's century."—Steve Erickson "Unlike anything else you will read this year, David Leo Rice's ANGEL HOUSE is at once an ode to memory, a de- and (re-) construction of what it is to be human, and a writer's-eye look at how and why we make stories and civilizations. Spinning outward from a core of surreal humor, Rice's second novel is the work of a fantastic and growing talent, one who aims to alter our very perceptions of reality. Evoking Sterne's Tristram Shandy in its sense of narrative whimsy and Pynchon in its use of multivalent symbology, ANGEL HOUSE presents the possibilities of meaning and nihilism, often simultaneously. For readers anxious to be intellectually challenged, this book is a treasure drawn from the eternal depths of our own Inland Sea."—Kurt Baumeister "A mind-bending, heartbreaking exploration of small towns and the legions upon legions of ghosts they contain. Elegant, freaky, and visionary—a must read!"—Guy Maddin

Angel House

Literature & Fiction

Rice, David Leo

Literary

Kernpunkt Press

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, &amp; 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 &amp; 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 &amp; 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 &amp; 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 &amp; 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.

A Room in Dodge City

Current, Alternating

Alternating Current

Sequel to A Room in Dodge City.A Bildungsroman couched in a tale of folk horror and cosmic paranoia. An elegy for the declining art of cinema.The first book in the Room in Dodge City trilogy brought us a nameless drifter arriving in a bizarre Western town that might encompass all of reality. Now, our drifter considers what happens when drifting on is no longer an option. Focusing on the mysterious workings of The Dodge City Film Industry and the personality cult surrounding Blut Branson, its most legendary director, Volume 2 asks hard questions about the nature of art, fame, competition and, ultimately, the ongoing struggle to be born. A mystical inquiry into the sacred and the profane, it expands the universe of the first volume, while exploring yet-stranger territory and laying the foundation for the trilogy's apocalyptic finale.

A Room in Dodge City 2: The Blut Branson Era

One of Southwest Review's Top 10 Must-Read Books of 2021One of Dennis Cooper's Favorite Books of 2021\nCollecting a decade's worth of stories by acclaimed author David Leo Rice, Drifter is a wild trip through the occult and surreal undercurrents of contemporary life. Ever in pursuit of illumination and unholy opportunity, the characters in these stories roam from blighted Western settlements to eerie New England circuses, from the backwoods of Austria to the remotest reaches of Japan, and from seedy Caribbean islands to the shadow of the Swiss Alps.\nBlessed and cursed with the freedom to transgress all boundaries-between waking and dreaming, home and exile, even life and death-Rice's Drifters operate in the shadows of our world, revealing how frayed the fabric of reality has become.\nRice's fiction touches on the strange, phantasmagorical, and horrific, but juxtaposes those elements with headier explorations of narratives and the self; it's like little else out there. -Vol. 1 Brooklyn\nLike peering through a slit at some brilliant, brutal new world, DRIFTER is unnerving and audaciously intelligent, full of wild possibility, dark humor, and lurking doom. With all the visceral detail and haunting logic of a beautiful, disturbing dream, Rice stylishly explores the grim, the hidden, the unhinged.- Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light\nA grotesque spectacle of unreality. - Matthew Baker, author of WHY VISIT AMERICA\nSomewhere Between Bradbury and Ligotti, Rice folds centuries of Americana into a space unstuck from time, where everything is an anachronism. Here, he explores the blurry divisions between adulthood and childhood, the seeming impossibility of atonement, the madness of certainty.- B.R. Yeager, author of Negative Space\nI'm trying to remember the last time a collection of stories so captured my attention by the strength of its voices and sense of presence in each of its living moments. Think Brian Evenson's Fugue State, or Susan Steinberg's early collections. There's such life here, such clarity of vision. It's exhilarating to watch a writer like Rice engage his ambitions so immediately and with a seemingly inexhaustible well of ideas. This is a magnificent book. - Grant Maierhofer\n...both eerily dense and unreal. Gloriously inventive, sober and freakish, this is a collection to relish. - Gary J. Shipley\nGrotesque and tender, irreal and grounded, nostalgic, forward-looking, and of the moment, David Leo Rice's Drifter, as its title suggests, isn't easily sited. Imagine going to a video store ca. 1998 and renting tapes at random from the "Cult Movies" section, but every tape you pick makes you want to tell all of your friends, "You have to see this." You have to read Drifter. -Gabriel Blackwell, author of Babel and CORRECTION\nThese stories hit you like those stairs, one after another after another, truly relentless until you hit the bottom. Looking up at those stairs you can see just how far you have fallen, just how far Rice has pushed you. - A.S. Coomer

Drifter, Stories (Summer Edition)

United States

11:11 Press LLC

A family of outsider artists roams the American interior in search of the New Jerusalem in David Leo Rice’s new dream novel, loosely inspired by the hermetic worlds of Joseph Cornell. As Tobias Carroll writes, “The childhood of Jakob, The New House’s young hero, is one unlike that of your typical coming-of-age narrative. His is a youth surrounded by prophetic dreams, religious schisms, and secretive conversations — plus some shocking scenes of violence. Rice’s prose creates a mood abounding with mystery and dread, and The New Housewould fit comfortably beside the likes of Michael McDowell’s Toplin and Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory in terms of disquieting portraits of sustained alienation.”

The New House

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Thrillers & Suspense

Whiskey Tit