Zach’s Reviews > Shadow Ticket > Status Update

“All he’s after is a coke dealer who won’t charge him a month’s wages for what’ll turn out to be half a pound of Alka-Seltzer.”

Pure Pynchon poetry.

I feel like fever dream gets tossed around liberally, as if it say it’s just a lil weird and surreal. This novel is a bona fide fever dream: for the first 100 or so pages, each chapter feels episodic and disconnected. Suddenly, once you’re on the boat, it takes off.

At the start, I didn’t enjoy this. Once you get to tasteless lamps surrounding a global psychic conspiratorial network, however……

Simultaneously one of the most addictive and exhausting books I’ve read. Period. But, it has the vibes of The Untouchables filtered through Pynchon, and a tone of Harjo’s FX show, The Lowdown (I’ve only seen one episode). Utterly ridiculous, cartoonish, yet realistic, and highly written. Feels like a follow-up to The Crying of Lot 49.

Yowza what’s going on? Story’s wild. Not a clue where this is going, but I’m having fun getting there. Definitely feels like an old school picaresque detective story, where each chapter pivots/leaps from the final lines of the previous.

Imagine if pomo experimental Pynchon wrote a Dashiell Hammet novel with dialogue that (wrongly?) reminds me of Tennessee Williams.