SEVEN DEMONS

At a moment of great inconvenience for international coke dealer and all-around scourge Jack Price—he and his gang of irregulars, the Seven Demons, have united to rob a high-security bank on a Swiss mountaintop—people are out to kill him.

The novel, narrated by Price, opens with a psychopathic 9-year-old boy named Evil Hansel stabbing him in the thigh with an oyster knife. Even after the kid—"a little Sound of Music–looking motherfucker in actual lederhosen"—is literally thrown under a car, he remains one of an array of cutthroats the Demons must deal with. One of Price's tactics is to fake his death and assume the identity of Banjo Telemark, an artist and "ambiguitionist" who specializes in "tearing down the world's certainty." Under his own assumed name, Truhen is consumed with tearing down the language of genre fiction. There is a bit of plot and mayhem ("Please don't explode my balls," pleads one sad case). And a trickle of honest emotion leaks from Price and Doc, a scary woman with whom he has a "Nietzschean and highly charged sexual relationship." But spritzed à la Lenny Bruce by the motor-mouthed Price, the book is mostly an epic word bath roiled by badass attitude, wild digressions, pitying self-analysis, and colorful sound effects (including a pig's scream). While the rampaging verbiage can be highly entertaining—think of John Kennedy Toole colliding with James Ellroy on TikTok—good luck trying to keep up. By the time you reach this mountaintop, you may well want to spend some quiet time with a book of haiku.

A postmodern heist novel with charged wordplay but flickering narrative.