It's the year 2039, and Lake Michigan is mysteriously emptied of water. The planet's atmosphere and magnetic field are failing, and fires burn ominously throughout the empty lake bed. In this seemingly endless desert east of Chicago, three factions are locked in conflict: the original end-of-times cultist settlers who follow religious visionary Fulcrum Maneuvers and worship a giant World Worm they deem responsible for the drained lake; the megacorporation Quadrilateral, a mega-consumerist, planned-community combine of bourgeois city planners developing what is now called the Wildland-Urban Interface; and the Blackout Angels, landlocked punk pirates raised in Quadrilateral cities, who oppose everything and everyone.
In Davis Schneiderman's shocking novel, Drain, freedom, creativity, and transgression wage war with forces of control, censorship, and conformity. The wordscapes of William S. Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon, the dystopic nightmares of Philip K. Dick, and the transgressive punch of Chuck Palahniuk and Georges Bataille together convene in this stunning and thrilling work.
About the Author :
Davis Schneiderman is an associate professor of English at Lake Forest College in Lake Forest, Illinois. He is the director of Lake Forest College Press and its imprint &NOW Books. He is the coauthor of Abecedarium.
Review :
"Drain is a post-American, post-apocalyptic novel of excess, at once hilarious and brutal, with all the over-the-top energy and weird delight of a psychedelic cartoon." --Lance Olsen, author of Head in Flames
"Drain is the Clockwork Orange of our age and anyone w ho cares about what we are becoming should read this book lest it become prophetic." --Steve Tomasula, author of TOC: A New Media Novel
"Think the poetic stew/spew of an illegitimate son of William Burroughs and Kathy Acker in a mid-twenty-first century Midwest comix reverie of punk hoodlums as if fashioned by Elmore Leonard gone mad as Lear upon Mackinac Island, the Great Lakes likewise gone cloacal, the post-American wind done gone wrong, and all of it, a gleeful earful of eloquent Ballardian-cum-Bardic effluvia, and you've almost got what Schneiderman's fashioned in Drain." --Michael Joyce, author of was: annales nomadique, a novel of internet
"Schneiderman has become a literary postmodern real-estate developer-slash-water reclamation engineer from Mars." --Cris Mazza, author of Trickle-Down Timeline and Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?
"Don't you dare blink. Not even once. There is no time to blink and there is too much at stake with looking away or awry. Davis Schneiderman's prose is lightning." --Doug Rice, author of Blood of Mugwump and Skin Prayer
