book cover of The Good and the Ghastly
 

The Good and the Ghastly

(2011)
A novel by

 
 
From a young author who has been compared to Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Pahlaniuk, comes a gangster noir epic set a thousand years into the future.

It's the thirty-fourth century and the nuclear apocalypse has come and gone. Civilization has rebuilt itself, and the results are eerily similar to the early part of the twenty-first century. But there are a few notable differences. Visa owns everything. Deer are the most common domesticated animal. And misinterpretations of pre-apocalyptic history run amuck (e.g. Palin established the theory of natural selection). But what hasn't changed is the nature of good and evil.

The Good and the Ghastly centers around two people linked through violence. Mobster Junior Alvarez has risen from child street thug to criminal overlord. He is a reprehensible man who will go to incredible lengths to get what he wants--power--and he desires to live however he pleases, without compromise. The intensity of his quest is matched only by that of the middle-aged mother of one of Alvarez's first victims. She has gone vigilante and is hunting down mobsters. The two are willing to go to the ends of the earth to manifest their wills--one good, one ghastly, both ruthless.

A wild satire of our own society, The Good and the Ghastly is a visceral novel informed with Boice's unnerving sense of reality and pathology. It is also an honest, old-fashioned, good-versus-evil story--with a twist of modern-day madness.

Genre: Science Fiction

Praise for this book

"The Good and the Ghastly is the hallucinogenic fever dream of contemporary satire. Alternately brutal and lyrical, it field-dresses everyday being with poetic violence. A decidedly necessary addition to post-millennial literature." - Darin Bradley

"James Boice brings the prose as hard as his characters bring the fierce in this post-apocalyptic battle story. A true original, Boice knocks it out of the park again." - Elizabeth Crane

"Boice’s book is like a literary Magic 8-Ball. Ask it questions, shake it up, and watch the novel’s playful, hilarious, and terrifying hallucination of our future. From one smuck-up to another, you’ll be hooked by the beautiful beating heart propelling this romp’s incredible energy." - Joshua Mohr

"Finding James Boice has been a revelation for me. His hard-bitten prose flies off the page at you like the cracking of a machine gun, and he infuses this violent, gritty and fast-paced novel with enough subtle satire and unexpected weirdness to keep you riveted right until you flip the final page." - Tony O'Neill

"Bloody and bloody funny, James Boice’s at once coolly objective and deeply human writing does the dystopian novel like no other. The Good and the Ghastly reads like Cormac McCarthy executing a Kurt Vonnegut premise through a Joan Didion filter. An original, in other words." - Andrew Pyper

"James Boice's sentences crack like hot electric bullwhips across the backs of America’s demons. By head-spinning turns arresting, violent, outraged, pointilistically detailed, tender and gut-busting hilarious, The Good and the Ghastly dances across a dystopian future in a mash-up of genre hooliganism and the inventive glee of literary madness. A page-turning adventure like none you’ve ever taken." - Christopher Ransom


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