Drifter Stories (Summer Edition)

One of Southwest Reviews Top 10 Must-Read Books of 2021One of Dennis Coopers Favorite Books of 2021Collecting a decades worth of stories by acclaimed author David Leo Rice Drifter is a wild trip through the occult and surreal undercurrents of contemporary life. Ever in pursuit of illumination and unholy opportunity the characters in these stories roam from blighted Western settlements to eerie New England circuses from the backwoods of Austria to the remotest reaches of Japan and from seedy Caribbean islands to the shadow of the Swiss Alps.Blessed and cursed with the freedom to transgress all boundaries-between waking and dreaming home and exile even life and death-Rices Drifters operate in the shadows of our world revealing how frayed the fabric of reality has become.Rices fiction touches on the strange phantasmagorical and horrific but juxtaposes those elements with headier explorations of narratives and the self; its like little else out there. -Vol. 1 BrooklynLike peering through a slit at some brilliant brutal new world DRIFTER is unnerving and audaciously intelligent full of wild possibility dark humor and lurking doom. With all the visceral detail and haunting logic of a beautiful disturbing dream Rice stylishly explores the grim the hidden the unhinged.- Kimberly King Parsons author of Black LightA grotesque spectacle of unreality. - Matthew Baker author of WHY VISIT AMERICASomewhere Between Bradbury and Ligotti Rice folds centuries of Americana into a space unstuck from time where everything is an anachronism. Here he explores the blurry divisions between adulthood and childhood the seeming impossibility of atonement the madness of certainty.- B.R. Yeager author of Negative SpaceIm trying to remember the last time a collection of stories so captured my attention by the strength of its voices and sense of presence in each of its living moments. Think Brian Evensons Fugue State or Susan Steinbergs early collections. Theres such life here such clarity of vision. Its exhilarating to watch a writer like Rice engage his ambitions so immediately and with a seemingly inexhaustible well of ideas. This is a magnificent book. - Grant Maierhofer...both eerily dense and unreal. Gloriously inventive sober and freakish this is a collection to relish. - Gary J. ShipleyGrotesque and tender irreal and grounded nostalgic forward-looking and of the moment David Leo Rices Drifter as its title suggests isnt easily sited. Imagine going to a video store ca. 1998 and renting tapes at random from the Cult Movies section but every tape you pick makes you want to tell all of your friends You have to see this. You have to read Drifter. -Gabriel Blackwell author of Babel and CORRECTIONThese stories hit you like those stairs one after another after another truly relentless until you hit the bottom. Looking up at those stairs you can see just how far you have fallen just how far Rice has pushed you. - A.S. Coomer