The Incurables

The year is 1953. Disgraced in the psychiatric hospital where hed practiced for nearly thirty years Dr. Walter Freeman has taken to traversing the country and proselyting about a very new kind of salvation: the transorbital lobotomy. With an ice pick and a hammer Freeman promises to cure depression and catatonia delusions and psychosis with a procedure as simple and safe as curing a toothache. When he enters the backwater Oklahoma town of Burnwood however his own sanity will be tested. Around him swirls a degenerate and delusional cast of characters-a preacher who believes his son to be the Messiah a demented and violent young prostitute and a trio of machete-wielding brothers-all weaved into a grotesque narrative that reveals how blind faith in anything can lead to destruction. Praise for THE INCURABLES: A twisted tour through the asylum that Jon Bassoff calls his mind. The Incurables is filled with the mad and desperate but ultimately its the humanity that Bassoff finds in his broken characters that sets this novel apart. Dont get me wrong though The Incurables is certifiably insane-and I mean that in the best possible way. -Johnny Shaw Anthony Award-winning author of Big MariaJon Bassoffs The Incurables practically bleeds off the page with a dark poetry so intense that you can still feel it after your eyes are closed. Its the rarest type of novel that wont only sink its teeth into you it will leave you relishing the scar. -Todd Robinson author of The Hard BounceWith influences and homage as wide and varied as The Alcoholics Cuckoos Nest and Murder in the Red Barn The Incurables oddly and most affectionately invokes Nick Cave-but not Cave the singer Cave the novelist-with its backwoods preachers hellbent harlots and dead-eyed dreamers. Think And the Ass Saw the Angel only superiorly written carved by prose that cuts deep. Bassoffs crooked trip to hell is a powerful rumination on the beauty of the damned. -Joe Clifford author of Junkie Love and LamentationThe Incurables reads like an unhinged murder ballad. In it Bassoffs crafted a violent-and oddly affecting-ode to the outcasts the downtrodden the broken the grotesque and the misunderstood. -Chris Holm author of The Big ReapThe Incurables is terse sparse and brutal yet strangely touching at times. Another winner from the Bassoff pen. -William Meikle author of The HoleImagine One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest as re-written by Elmore Leonard. A mesmerizing novel. -Ken Bruen Shamus Award-winning author of The Guards