Louse: A Novel

A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. Herbert Horatio Poppy Blackwell was once a daring aviator an illustrious movie producer and a brilliant businessman. A Howard Hughes–like mogul Poppy has become a recluse with paralyzing fears of infection. Cloistered in the penthouse high above his desert gambling empire he is attended by a small army of maids and footmen and lawyers and physicians who live in a state of constant surveillance as they cater to his eccentric paranoid demands. Herman Q. Louse is Poppys valet one of the many indentured servants who have racked up an insurmountable debt in his casino (and whose long-term memories have subsequently been erased). Louses primary duty is to administer Poppys medication: near-lethal doses of benzodiazepines. But as he goes about his carefully monitored business he becomes aware of a growing conspiracy against Poppy and becomes his unlikely protector―that is until people start to point fingers at Louse. Dark disturbing yet acerbically funny Louse by David Grand is a vividly imagined tale at once timely and unforgettable.