Benjamin #1
About this book
IN ONE L.A. MOTEL ROOM, A COSMIC QUEST IS ABOUT BEGIN. . . . Edgar Award nominee and Philip K. Dick Award–winner Ben H. Winters (EC’s Cruel Universe, The Last Policeman Trilogy) and rising star Leomacs (EC’s Epitaphs from the Abyss, Refrigerator Full of Heads) unravel a three-part, prestige format series exploring the hallucinatory second life of a brilliant author who imagined our desperate future but never imagined he’d become part of it . . . More than just a writer, more than just a science-fiction icon, Benjamin J. Carp was a cultural revolutionary. Across 44 novels and hundreds of short stories—including the counterculture classic The Man They Couldn’t Erase—Carp pushed the boundaries of literary respectability for the sci-fi genre and his readers’ perception of reality itself . . . until decades of amphetamine abuse and Southern California excess finally ended a mind-bending career that always just escaped mainstream success. He died in 1982. Until 2025 . . . when Benjamin J. Carp awakens, alive, in a burned-out motel on the fringes of Los Angeles. He remembers dying. He knows he shouldn’t exist. Is he a dream? A robot? A ghost? A clone? A simulation? In his own time, Carp pondered all of these scenarios intensely through his fiction—and, now, as he treks from Studio City to Venice Beach and onward into the paranoid sprawl of 21st-century Los Angeles, he will be called to investigate his greatest mystery himself. In the tradition of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly and Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice comes a uniquely fascinating and hilariously deranged excursion into the metatextual nexus where existence and oblivion, past and future, genius and madness, and glitter and grim reality all meet just beyond Hollywood Boulevard . . .