A Room in Dodge City

by David Leo Rice, Christina Collins (Illustrator)

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.

Genres: Fiction, Fantasy, Novels, Westerns

200 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 7, 2016

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 3 out of 5]

An impeccably maintained continuum of scenes governed by a dream logic that blends the absurd, the surreal, and the horrific. I'd rather read about this incarnation of Dodge City than visit it. (3.5)

[Noah Fischer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book refreshing and addictive. There’s something Western going on in this journey into the psycho-geography of Dodge City: a Drifter wanders into a dusty desert town/stage set where unthinkable dangers lurk at every turn. But nothing is fixed, and we quickly lose our bearing and give in to Rice’s alternative logic— a pleasurable web of thorny fables, poetics, satire, and indulgent, but distanced, gore. The narrator is part anthropologist, leading us through Dodge City’s cults and rituals with an inviting humility and precision, yet, as is noted about one of the more colorful characters, the comedian/liar Big Pharmakos: he “enjoy[s] skirting the edge of making sense.” But to me, this book did make sense. Passages could sometimes be so knowing, I had to put the book down, pay attention to a weird emotion invoked. A Room in Dodge City has this double-text sense in general: the story itself and then, the sense of getting distracted in the telling of it. Along the way we encounter dazzling bits of wordplay and philosophical nuggets to chew on. We get to watch the inhabitants of Dodge City line up to chew on someone’s intestines. The City’s larger than life characters cycle through, each some sort of bullshit artist with their signature habits, but then again, never reappearing in quite the same form so that we start to suspect, as we suspect about all of it, that at least a portion is just in our heads.

Like a Cronenberg movie, the horror-scape is the main course, built from a plasticity of flesh and morphing between sex and death—the transformations often seamless. To my mind, the Dantesque (references pile up, David Lynch is another big one) exhibition of horror vignettes is where Rice offers some of his brightest inventions-really crazy and creative. But all of it vigilantly engineered. At times I sometimes wasn’t sure if narrative twists had been worked out like a perfect puzzle or developed as irreverent tangents/ fever dreams—maybe all of the above, but the concepts deepened impressively through the descent. A theme of life (procreation) and death (letting go) and belonging (to a place/culture) are well developed by the time we finish.

For me, the book has a purifying effect—fitting presciently with these pandemic times. It puts things into perspective, and therefore, though gross and disturbing, reading it was strangely comforting. And often very funny.

[Sol · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Room in Dodge City is one of the most unique novels I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. Like many great works of inventive fiction, it’s hard to describe or summarize. The closest I can think of is: a comic nightmare you might have after a midnight snack of cold pizza garnished with a few tabs of acid. David Leo Rice has crafted a novel that expertly evokes the rhythm of dreams in its explorations of death, identity, and ambition. Just like in dreams, in Dodge City the most insane developments can seem eminently obvious and utterly inevitable. As you read the book, you enter a world where surreal mystery and abject horror are the banal facts of everyday life. The nameless protagonist drifts from event to event, his fate decided by inscrutable cues and shifts in the mysterious environment of Rice’s blighted city. The bizarre entities he encounters include a struggling comedian named Big Pharmakos, the shadowy Professor Dalton, shtetl stranglers, Night Crushers, Beckett-quoting bull heads, and a cop who wants to be critiqued on the writing of his police report on unspeakable steam room atrocities. Rice tells the story of the protagonist’s journey in a flow of vignettes that are equal parts unsettling, captivating, and laugh out loud funny. A Room in Dodge City is a great first novel from a talented young author, and a reading experience like no other.

[Kristen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel-in-vignettes follows a drifter through a fragmented, lonely world where a drifter encounters often monstrous characters as he wanders through a surreal world. The novel was a pleasure to read; it's an unusual and delightful mix of wit and horror and existential gloom. The loneliness of the narrator feels extremely modern and relatable despite the grotesque, urban-horror, Ryu-Murakami-esque inventiveness of what's literally happening to him; he's utterly disconnected from the world, except by dirty videos and chance encounters with people who float on and off the scene, but he's still very human. I hadn't really read anything like this before and I was completely surprised and enthralled by it.

[VT Dorchester · Rating 3 out of 5]

I mostly enjoyed reading this strange, meandering little book even though I didn't know what was happening a lot of the time. I have a feeling it's a book intended primarily for people with more formal education - or more self-directed education in 'serious' literature, film and philosophy and thus with a greater ability to understand/appreciate the cultural allusions made within than me - I only caught a few - or maybe it's for people who spend more time with mind-alternating chemicals than I do. Or for those who like people to think they spend time with mind-altering chemicals and poetry. Or all three. People who like to think that within a certain segment of society, they are really cool, although admitting to wanting to be cool is of course deeply uncool. It feels like being invited to listen to some one quite talented recite their dreams - one's in which sex impinges on occasion and which can never make entire sense to someone else even if they could make sense to the person who had them... And it is a bit of a cool book. Who wouldn't want to be a cool book?

And yet...yes, it is interesting, but to what purpose?
I suspect there is a purpose here, that is is possibly a metaphysical or philosophical or political purpose, but what it is was is not clear to me.
I mostly liked it, although without understanding it, or really feeling that I wanted or needed to delve into the possibly deep meanings within.
And I do think I could provide a vague answer to "what is the plot about" - but I also don't think what vague plot there is is really the point of the read, the reason for publication, the why of this book's praise.
The reason it's here is to be intellectually cool, drool.

And it is to this book's credit that despite not being 'the kind' of book that I would usually read, because my mind favours concrete and black and white endings and this is not the Kansas I've seen on winter road trips, granted it's not intended to be the Kansas we know anymore, Toto, I still found it mostly entertaining and enjoyable and I'm glad that I gave it a try during a publisher's sale. I am planning on lending this book out to a philosophically inclined friend.

[Lorenzo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Follow the drifter through the door of A Room in Dodge City and plunge down into the widening gyre - into a gnawing Odyssey through 21st-century America's glories of nightmare and hallucination. Unlike Odysseus, Rice's characters roam restlessly, compulsively a world lost to the possibility and even the very memory of return, crumpling in the grip of urban mazes in a barrenness of vision-blasted wildernesses; a world where to exist is to fade in and out of the surreal - to drift. The book conjures up a long sustained stare into the numbing void of anguishes that might have saturated out of writing Kafka himself. A void nobody ignores these days. One of many good reasons to read it.

[Leah Angstman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a bizarre, head-scratching, Lynchian maze of what-the-eff meets social commentary, American Horror Show, a town created by Tom Waits, and a Samuel Beckett-style circular nightmare of waiting and watching that you can never get out of. The prose is spot-on, and your head will do backflips at every vignette. Highly recommended for lovers of the absurd, bizarre, surreal, and fantastical, with elements of political and social metaphor.

[Andy Weston · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this blend of weird and western fiction the nameless narrator arrives in Dodge City, and spirals rapidly down a maelstrom of part hallucinatory, part transcendental absurdity. It is soon clear that this man, a drifter and seemingly no agenda has actually arrived to the vast Midwestern expanses with a purpose, and there begins to unfold, a geography of his own life. A path, as he says, westward and inward to some decisive moment of ‘fruition’, adjusting the screams of the demons, at last, to the full pitch of a vocation.

It’s not hard to spot Rice’s influences, indeed he occasionally quotes them, (Bukowski, Brannigan, Bob Dylan..) and the reader would be forgiven if they thought this weird and witty novel to be a product of the 1960s. Though actually, it was published in 2017. It has achieved something of a cult status, mainly because these days, certainly in the UK, it is very difficult to get hold of a copy.

[Danny E. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crazy! Fun! Humorous and dark! I v. much enjoyed this book. The vignette structure is pleasing and effective (and was frankly perfect for a COVID-quarantine read), and the world itself is simply magical: places, people, elements, things all sort of blend and bleed into and out of each other in a really marvelous, skillful way. I'm not sure I have read any contemporary work that matches this for its sense of the absurdity of a certain kind of modern experience. Also, the sheer number and breadth of allusions in this book is staggering. It's a good read and a smart read and it's also very well-written. I'll be very excited to read more Dodge City once it's available!

[Pamela Ryder · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Leo Rice works a dark magic here in Dodge, his talismans being perceptions of such detail and force that they seem to materialize from a background as dark as the pit. Unnerving and beautiful, hell itself could never be as captivating as the shabby hotel herein, where the whimpering on the other side of a door beckons, and you cannot help but lean into it, your ear to the board, and finally, to lift the latch and turn the knob.

[Jeff Raymond · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't expect to love this as much as I did, but this book is short of like it Jeff Vandermeer and David Lynch teamed up to produce an episode of Prairie Home Companion and it's just wonderful.

[Alex Friedfeld · Rating 5 out of 5]

This bizarre, mesmerizing book unmoors the reader from the get-go and takes them on a journey into the surreal that rewards with each vignette. I finished A Room in Dodge City a few weeks ago and I still find myself thinking back on scenes that stuck with me because of their humor, absurdity, or horror – and often a combination of all three. A highly entertaining read that I can’t recommend enough.

[Asa_Campion · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Room in Dodge City
This is one of five books that I’ll read every year so that I don’t lose myself to the pasteurization of Everyday American Reality.

Or maybe so I *will* lose myself, but to Rice’s spooky-freaky-funny edge-of-reality vignettes. I’ve now read it three times: each time I’ve finished it, I’m left with a full mind-album. Ahead of me are days of coming down from the trip.

Rice pushes situations and characters beyond where a more timid, less competent writer would stop. The story never loses sense but instead defines new awareness just past where the reader thinks s/he sees the limit.

I enjoyed the gentle, humorous writer self-references that Rice sprinkles throughout, and especially inventive descriptions.

Don’t try to figure out who what where when like I did on the first read. My best advice: give in and ride this wild tale along the dream dystopia highway wherever it takes you.

[Rick Claypool · Rating 5 out of 5]

Straight-up deadpan literary bizarro, something like Hemingway reporting from a Hieronymous Bosch version of dustier parts of Middle America. Rice knows how to write the weird and how to write it succinctly -- and succinct and weird are two of my favorite flavors of writing. Highly recommend.

[Pearse Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have five long pages of notes on this topic, most on this work of Rice's I finished a few minutes ago. Hopefully I will be sitting down to talk to him about it in the coming weeks. But, for now:

This book would not have gotten five stars (9/10 on my spreadsheet) if it was not self-aware. Knowing nothing about art, I would say this is a piece of Dada art, and I tend to hate that movement. It can be especially frustrating since I am living in a Dada apartment my grandparents decorated. Alas: I can find experimental style to be too out-there, too wild. I recently learned the idiom "if you open your mind too far, your brains will fall out." Thanks, the Guardian's longform journalists. Rice skirts this nicely. The Drifter narrator openly discusses the random segues, the format of the adventure, the twisted, wasted logic of Dodge City, and how others have oversaturation points where they stop caring. YES! My oversaturation point was in the Desert, where the Suicide Same / Sparklehouse B-plot felt too unconnected from the characters I had grown to love in Dodge City, characters like Big Pharmakos and Gottfried Bean or whatever he was called. It's a hard book. It's hard because it's a "novel of vignettes," making structure disjointed and flashy, but the ideas so intertwined in a classic novel-style that one should read a large portion at a time to absorb this. I love the vignettes, but the final product has the drawbacks an interconnected series of short stories might not have had.
But Rice knew what he was doing. He knew and he went forward, and he presented something interesting and different on every page. Could have used a dose less body horror a times (not squeamish, just felt lazy) but overall you could tell it is a force of nature, it is art.

This book is hilarious. Mostly because it follows one of the basic elements of comedy: it's relational. It's about how the audience sees themselves in the stories and observations of the speaker. The twists and turns here were interdimensional, but they got grounded quickly, with brilliant details that confirm that yes, this is HUMANITY we're looking at. David Leo Rice is a smart HUMAN, not a mass of seething flesh and fluid like those that appear in his stories.

Rice does a few things a lot, I've noticed
He loves Drifters. He always has a few in a scene or a piece. Mostly protagonists.
Connected, he loves heterotopic spaces. Perhaps this is just because I've been studying them, but almost every scene in Dodge City was in some kind of intermediary landscape. Mass graves, bus stations, comedy clubs, funerals, television sets, religious meetings, sideshows and carnivals, trials, prisons, hospitals, and breeding projects are clearly heterotopias by Focault's definitions. This leads to some amazing scenes. The mass of organized meetings lead to some real business. I love heterotopias, man.
He has a bunch of cars. I cannot remember any time someone used a horse. Often, these cars are more than transportation. They also act as confessionals, bunkers, graveyards, and mental asylums. Guess what I just named? More fucking heterotopias.
He has a lot of rubbery things in his work. Also, a lot of Internet culture tidbits, references to YouTube tutorials and GIFs. Perhaps this is organic for someone who publishes their novel on tumblr.
Often, things are compared to historical artists, sometimes philosophers or oral historians or writers. Many German, which makes sense given his minor at Harvard. Why was an Alan Lomax lookalike in one scene??
There is tons of nondiagetic logic. The protagonist knows the names of characters as they appear, and sometimes their function and role and their logic. This is true in some of Rice's fiction, too. There is a lack of connection between the gears behind the story/world and the reader, but there are sparks.
Connected, there are quite a few Power Dynamics. God, here I go capitalizing things, I won't try to Deny it. One byproduct/parallel symptom with this weird logic is characters knowing that Bad Things Will Happen if they make a choice considered "wrong." Who is making this greater philosophical decisions? Sometimes Eldritch abominations, sometimes mob justices, sometimes just greater authorities that are never spoken of, but their presence is there by their weight in the story. Characters instantly recognize of this greater Order, not quite a Black Helicopter Syndrome, more twisted and grand than that. But a lot of what they do is through fear of the Order. Can feel very authoritarian.
Other things are never explained. I'm incredibly curious how he wrote the short story "Egon's Parents," for reasons I won't spoil. Here, less is explained. We are constantly pushed into accepting this Dodge City Logic or we will die on page twenty. If you catch on it's a fascinating. The worldbuilding Rice has built into each paragraph can inspire countless stories. The original Sparklehorse ice cream shop letter inspired a Weird story I'm writing now that I could not be prouder of. There is a wealth of information and creativity here. It takes guts or stupidity to leave all that slop on the page and skid across it like its there as a thought- and story-lubricant. I hope Rice can remove some ideas from the lost city of Dodge and perhaps place them into more grounded universes, where they could go wild.

Slight spoiler: My favorite aspect of this was how we never stayed in base/original reality (like in Primer? Carruth and Rice have some overlaps). Early in the book, the protagonist falls asleep, dreams, and I don't think he ever woke up. The story continued, the logic unchanged because it was already dream logic. Characters will start telling stories, and slowly that story will become the main story, and again our characters are transposed. Characters will enter spaces and be forever changed by them, like the scene with the Eye and the Chain Gang.

In this book, things are capitalized. My favorites: Bus Station, this Town, Hotel and Hotel Lobby, my Material and my Blood. Heaven, Hell, Suicide, Folklore, Lecture, Death, Diner, Pilgrims, Dust Ritual, Outstretched Hand of God, Incest, Pagan Analogue, Celebration, Outskirts, the Dodge City Logic, Benefactor, Slaughterers, Porn, Names, Chemo, Flesh Pool, Deny, Corporeal Victims, Mass Watery Grave, and Internets of Spell and Prophecy.

Didn't love the ending. Didn't love some of the changes made to the setting. Did I already say that? This is getting to be too much for a review. See you guys later on Weird Fiction Review where I'll be talking to him. Overall, again this is a 9/10 satisfying experimental work of Lynchian Americana I did not think existed in book form without having some tie to some dumb Italian movement or whatever.

Connection: friends with David Leo Rice of Facebook, interviewing him for Weird Fiction Review in July 2017, read some of his unreleased work.

[Steve Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not totally sure how I feel about this one. It flows well, no problem acknowledging the phonetic beauty and imagery of it. But it's also the kind of book where you can drift off while reading, have no idea where you faded out, just keep reading at whatever page you're looking down at and not feel like you've missed anything. Just a long series of Burroughs-y dreamscapes. Which is fine. I picked it up after reading a short story Rice had in Catapult about a euthanasia rollercoaster. That's worth checking out as well.

[Andrei · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dodge City accomplishes familiarity without recognition. It operates on archetypes and essences and cuts right to intimate thoughts the reader has likely never quite articulated.

[Jason Arias · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an exhilarating stay in a room attached to a room attached to a room. A world that feels overwhelming and exaggerated, yet subtly and slantedly familiar. This book feels like the end of Steppenwolf extrapolated to exhaustion, or the imaginary Mall demons scene in Stubblefield's Homunculus in the best ways possible.

[Richard Rice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dodge City is hilarious and terrifying. And there is no way out!

[Ctgt · Rating 3 out of 5]

6/10

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shocking, funny and erudite, "A Room in Dodge City" is a surrealist mirror that reflects our 21st century existence. If Kafka was alive and living in America, the prose born of his cunning might read like the prose of David Rice. I loved it.