A bright and acerbic depiction of the slacker culture of Texas and a testament to a lost and found generation.
Dave stepped out of Bastrop Federal Prison after a six-month stretch for tax evasion and into the home of one Margueritte Johnson, a.k.a. the Old Lady. The Old Lady passed on, leaving her house and her fortune to her twenty-three cats. But the cats need a caretaker – or so he thinks.
But there are others with an eye on the Johnson estate, and soon Dave is caught up in a whirlwind of anarchists, gold diggers, skateboard punks, lawyers, hackers, and arsonists – a population of dropouts and misfits who will do anything to avoid doing anything.
Head of Zeus * Fiction
01 Aug 2019 * 176pp * £6.99 * 9781789541267
REVIEWS
'A beautifully understated comic nightmare about an ex-con's misbegotten attempts to tread the straight and narrow outside the slammer ... After a series of plot twists worthy of Thomas Pynchon or Joe Orton [...] Shiner does manage a happy ending as magically unexpected as pulling 23 cats out of a hat'
Kirkus Reviews
'An unqualified delight'
Publishers Weekly
'Slam is a New Age farce with a libertarian moral. It takes a laid-back squint at reality and then slips into an alternate groove all its own'
Boston Globe
'A quirky joy of a novel, one that happens to be thought provoking'
Houston Chronicle
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