![]() ![]() When Shannon pursues Stephens, the ring’s magic transports him to an otherworldly “scratch land” populated by skull-headed beings whose rituals-involving card games and strange dancing-shape a cosmic context for catastrophic events that unfold in the human world. Shannon discovers that Silverberg was first swindled, then murdered by a pair of con men, one of whom-a gambler named Stephens-wears an ornate ring with magic powers. In 1888, a Jewish private detective who goes by the name of Shannon travels from Chicago to Victoria, Tex., to investigate the disappearance of New Yorker Nathan Silverberg, who was sent with donor funds to buy land on the Texas coast for a settlement of Romanian Jewish refugees. “Steeped in the early history of Texas’s statehood and laced with eerie portents of supernatural horror, the outstanding latest from Wexler ( The Painting and the City) impresses with its originality and inventiveness. We’ve heard a lot in the past several years about genre-blending or ‘‘cross-genre’’ fiction, but Wexler starts out by combining two genres that seldom come up in these discussions: the western and the hard-boiled private eye mystery.” ![]() “It’s one of the mostly deeply weird novels I’ve read in some time, at times hallucinatory and dreamlike, at other times gritty and naturalistic. ![]() ![]() With The Silverberg Business, Robert Freeman Wexler has delivered a gloriously strange hard-boiled tale that crosses genres and defies expectations. His investigations lead him to a malevolent white-haired gambler, monstrous sand dune totems, and a group of skull-headed poker players trapped in an endless loop of cards and alcohol, who may be his only means to survive the business. What seems to be a simple job soon pushes Shannon into stranger territory. Galveston’s new rabbi asks Shannon to find Nathan Silverberg, gone missing along with a group of swindlers who claim to be soliciting money for a future colony of Romanian Jewish refugees. In 1888, Shannon, a Chicago private detective, returns home to Galveston, Texas for a wedding. 3-6, World Fantasy Convention, New Orleans, LA » Robert & Victor LaValle reading KGB Bar, NYC, 4/20/22 » Robert interviewed by Rick Kleffel on Narrative Species » an interview on Good People, Cool Things. In 1888 in Victoria, Texas, for a simple job, a Chicago private eye gets caught up in much darker affairs and ends up in the poker game to end all poker games. Tue - Filed under: Books| Posted by: Gavin ![]()
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