About Absolute Unit:
“Action-packed, gory, and hilarious. I loved it!”—Michelle Garza
Absolute
Unit is a dark carnival ride through the underside of the American
Dream, where hustlers and parasites fight to survive against gun-toting
furries, sarcastic drug kingpins, old ladies who are startlingly good
with knives, and angry ex-girlfriends. It’s a hardboiled slice of modern
American horror that asks the deepest question of all: Is the human
race worth saving?
Bill is a nobody, a health inspector who’s not
above taking a few dollars to overlook a restaurant’s mouse problem,
and hated by nearly everyone except his long-suffering girlfriend. His
nephew, Trent, isn’t much better: sexually and morally confused, he’s
probably the worst teenage con artist on the East Coast. But today,
these two losers are going to become the most important people in the
world.
That’s because Bill and Trent harbor a sentient parasite
with a sarcastic sense of humor and a ravenous appetite. As the parasite
figures out how to control its new human hosts, the focus of its
desires grows from delicious cheeseburgers and beer to something much
darker and more dangerous.
The apocalypse might come from within us…
“[This] bizarro crime horror story is a friggin’ blast, packed chock full of comedy, outrageousness, and violence.”—Michael Patrick Hicks, author of The Resurrectionists
Proudly represented by Crystal Lake Publishing—Tales from the Darkest Depths.
Excerpt:
1.
Every day, all day, Bill smells shit or burning hair. Bill asks everybody if they smell those things, and when they say no (“What smell, dude?”), Bill thinks they’re lying to him. (Bill, your friendly neighborhood health inspector, thinks everybody lies to him.) Only when Bill starts smelling the distinct odor of his wife’s crotch does he begin to suspect something’s well and truly wrong with the ol’ noggin—she’s been dead for years.
Not that Bill will see a doctor about his symptoms, no sir. Instead he’ll smoke and snort and screw the fear away, because a buzz always beats reality, and the idea of a tumor or an artery primed to blow is as real as it gets. On Monday, Bill takes two hundred dollars in hankie-soft bills from a corner market, in exchange for overlooking a frisky roach, and uses it to purchase a few small bags of the finest chemical concoction some creep could cook up in a kitchen sink, which he smokes in the front seat of his Official Government Vehicle before driving to his favorite strip club. That fine institution always earns an ‘A’ when inspection time rolls around, in exchange for a regular gratis lunch of a burger and pints and a bored lap-dance from someone who’d rather be anywhere but near him.
We sense the disgusted look on your face. Really, what else do you expect poor Bill to do? Born with a nubby penis and a tendency toward obesity, the meat computer in his skull loaded with buggy software, it’s a miracle that Bill made it this far. A thousand years ago, he would have been a sex toy for Vikings on his way to becoming worm food. These days, the twin wonders of medical technology and modern law will ensure that he lives long enough to realize he can’t obliterate the memories of his dead wife and all his failures, no matter how hard he tries.
But we’re going to help him, mostly because we don’t have a choice. Bill is our home.
Amazon
About Nick Kolakowski:
No comments:
Post a Comment