The Big Red Herring

by Andrew Farkas

The United States and the Soviet Union were allies, not enemies. The moon landing was a hoax filmed by Stanley Kubrick. The Space Race and the Cold War were diversions enacted to cover up the biggest secret ever kept. But Wallace Heath Orcuson (Wall to his friends) has more immediate problems to deal with. He’s just woken up in an apartment he’s never seen before. There’s a dead body under his couch. It’s his girlfriend’s husband, a man named “Senator” Kipper Maris. Meanwhile, at a donut shop, a radio narrator, who’s been forced to adopt the name Edward R. Murrow, reads Wall’s story. He hates it. He wants to change it. The problem: Murrow is a narrator, not a writer, and the penalty for altering a manuscript is death. Luckily for Murrow, his boss, “Senator” Kipper Maris, was recently murdered. So maybe no one will notice. Or maybe there’s a reason for the rule. But you can’t find out what’s in Pandora’s box until it’s opened, right? Who wants to see what’s inside?

357 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2019

About the author

Andrew Farkas is the author of seven books: The Great Indoorsman: Essays (University of Nebraska Press), The Big Red Herring (KERNPUNKT Press), Sunsphere: Stories (BlazeVOX Books), Self-Titled Debut: Stories (Subito Press), Are You Now or Have You Ever Been: Stories (Alternating Current Press), Movies Are Fine for a Bright Boy Like You: Stories (Whiskey Tit), and The Ancient Mysteries of Las Vegas: a Play (KERNPUNKT Press). He is also an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Washburn University and an editor for Always Crashing.

Reviews

[David Rice · Rating 5 out of 5]

A mind-blowing trip into a century's worth of paranoia, nested conspiracies, alternate histories of alternate histories, and the reliable unreliability of narrative itself (within or beyond the will of any given narrator), ultimately revealing the deeply strange nature of *any* account of reality, no matter how sane it may seem.

Farkas' novel is also a reading experience unlike any other, causing a kind of mental crackle and frisson that'll truly take you someplace you've never been before... right into the unstable programming room of reality itself, where you'll bear firsthand witness to the chaos that goes into making our language-mediated world seem to cohere.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is wonderfully dizzying. It moves like a knuckleball, which is definitely intentional after reading. Impressive for many things, not the least of which is managing to pull all this off. Great stuff.