Lewis Shiner emerges as a major new voice in contemporary fiction with Slam, his most powerful work to date. Here, the widely praised author of Deserted Cities of the Heart records his vision of late-twentieth-century America.
Dave, paroled after six months' hard time for tax evasion, has just landed the world's greatest job – no mean feat for a man whose distaste for work put him in prison in the first place. A rich old lady has left her fortune to her twenty-three cats. As their caretaker, Dave is to receive a salary, expenses, and the use of her luxury beach house.
Almost immediately things start to go wrong. The old woman's money is the focus of a power struggle between a cast of bizarre characters: Mary Nixon, the beautiful adventuress; Bryant C. Whitney, pastor of the local UFO church; Mrs. Cook, Dave's fundamentalist parole officer; Barbara and Charles, deaf and blind pirate-treasure hunters; and last, but not least, the enigmatic Terrell, philosopher, political theorist, and escaped murderer, who has decided to make Dave's home his own.
Allied against them are Dave's new friends, the collection of skateboarders living in the abandonded concrete mansions just down the beach. These are society's newest outlaws, and from them Dave will learn the meaning of true freedom in an unfree world.
Taking its energy from the invisible cultures that flourish all around us, Slam is as immediate as a knock at your front door.
