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In this debut crime-horror story collection, David Simmons drags you into a phantasmagoric Baltimore where the dead refuse to stay dead and the living claw for meaning.
Hallucinatory and darkly comic love stories are set against the gritty backdrop of the city, where guns and drugs collide with tales of paranoia, pursuit, and revenge. Here, a middle school biology class spirals into a surreal vivisection. A man returns home each night to chew the freshly grown fingers off a corpse to avoid going into withdrawal. A monster in an upstairs apartment kills people, records songs about it, and retweets his victims postmortem.
In these stories, love arrives wearing the mask of addiction and absurdity. If Brian Evenson and Ottessa Moshfegh wrote for The Wire you'd get the unique style of David Simmons. Fans of body horror, transgressive fiction, and literary surrealism will find themselves unable to look away as Simmons explores the intersections of violence and dark humor with a razor-sharp voice.
"Simmons’s writing is witty and sardonic, and utterly insane without losing lucidity." —FanFiAddict
"David Simmons is the gunpowder priest of wild shit. Smart, fun, and dangerous, his stories are like if Galaxy Gas and Borges cowrote a novel in neon lights. Fetty on the Switches sizzles and awes." —Brian Allen Carr, author of Opioid, Indiana and Bad Foundations
"Simmons's debut collection is a song of poisoned bodies, laser-focused on those who’ve been irreversibly contaminated by their environments, their peers, their selves. It’s vicious, whip smart, fucking hilarious, and just might break your heart. Not to put too fine a point on it: Simmons is one of the most exciting authors working today, genre or otherwise. Don’t sleep." —B.R. Yeager, author of Negative Space
Previous Praise
"David Simmons is the most exciting, wildest writer I've come across in years. He'll make you wince from horror, laugh from dialogue, and then, when you're distracted by eldritch gods and conceptual madness, he'll emotionally gut you. One of the very best." —e. rathke, author of Howl and Glossolalia
"These stories will cut you with a surgeon’s precision and unearth emotions you didn’t even know were lying dormant." —Grant Wamack, author of Bullet Tooth
"David Simmons burst on the scene with a voice so confident and precise that he must have honed it in a past life. He will be one of the greats. I have no doubt about that." —J. David Osborne, author of Dying World and War in Heaven
"Not since Vonnegut has there been a more distinct and perfect alchemy of absurdism, heart, and intellect than in the work of David Simmons." —Kelby Losack, author of Mercy and Letting Out The Devils
"Simmons replicates the experience of stress into a surrealism of violence. Not a portrait of evil but of its consequences." —O.F. Cieri, author of Backmask