Last Week's Apocalypse

Cover art by Gee Vaucher.

Gore Vidal meets Philip K. Dick, in this collection of "lit-fabulist" stories. Douglas Lain's work has been attracting high profile attention throughout the genre, and this collection features some of his finest and most controversial fiction.

Contents:

• The '84 Regress
• On a Scale of 1 to Three
• The Sea Monkey Conspiracy
• The Word "Mermaid" Written on an Index Card
• Music Lessons
• Subliminal Son
• The Headline Trick
• The Suburbs of the Citadel of Thought
• The Dead Celebrity
• Shopping at the End of the World
• Instant Labor
• How to Stop Selling Jesus
• I Read the News Today
• Identity is a Construct

Praise for Douglas Lain and his work:

"Doug has a great brain. I am hugely impressed with his prospects to be a completely uncommercial genius. God help him." – Jonathan Lethem

"Straight out of the Pamela Zoline era of New Wave fiction, with a strong dose of nuclear paranoia and Reagan-era 'kill a Commie for mommy' reverse-nostalgia, Lain writes from the conscience." – Jay Lake

"It's legitimate SF, and it's 'mainstream,' and it's metafiction: I don't know anyone else doing quite what Lain is doing; fascinating work, moving, strikingly honest, powerful." – Rich Horton, Locus Magazine

"Lain is a master at imbedding information for the reader to discover on subsequent readings." – Therese Pieczynski, Tangent Online

"Philip K. Dick would have admired Douglas Lain's 'The Sea Monkey Conspiracy,' and would have been unsettled by it, for the same reason-he would have seen himself in the alienated young narrator/protagonist. He might have argued that it's a sequel to-and perhaps better than-his 1979 story 'The Exit Door Leads in.'" – Paul Williams, author of Only Apparently Real, The World of Philip K. Dick

"Reads with compelling immediacy, an unnerving combination of masks, secrets that distort and finally shred one's identity..." – Sherwood Smith, Tangent Online

"A must-read for originality and perceptive social satire." – Daniel E. Blackstone's Firebrand Fiction Column