The Heap

by Sean Adams

Overview

“As intellectually playful as the best of Thomas Pynchon and as sardonically warm as the best of Kurt Vonnegut, The Heap is both a hilarious send-up of life under late capitalism and a moving exploration of the peculiar loneliness of the early 21st century. A masterful and humane gem of a novel.” —Shaun Hamill, author of A Cosmology of Monsters

Blending the piercing humor of Alexandra Kleeman and the jagged satire of Black Mirror, an audacious, eerily prescient debut novel that chronicles the rise and fall of a massive high-rise housing complex, and the lives it affected before - and after - its demise.

Standing nearly five hundred stories tall, Los Verticalés once bustled with life and excitement. Now this marvel of modern architecture and nontraditional urban planning has collapsed into a pile of rubble known as the Heap. In exchange for digging gear, a rehabilitated bicycle, and a small living stipend, a vast community of Dig Hands removes debris, trash, and bodies from the building’s mountainous remains, which

Orville Anders burrows into the bowels of the Heap to find his brother Bernard, the beloved radio DJ of Los Verticalés, who is alive and miraculously broadcasting somewhere under the massive rubble. For months, Orville has lived in a sea of campers that surrounds the Heap, working tirelessly to free Bernard—the only known survivor of the imploded city—whom he speaks to every evening, calling into his radio show.

The brothers’ conversations are a ratings bonanza, and the station’s parent company, Sundial Media, wants to boost its profits by having Orville slyly drop brand names into his nightly talks with Bernard. When Orville refuses, his access to Bernard is suddenly cut off, but strangely, he continues to hear his own voice over the airwaves, casually shilling products as “he” converses with Bernard.

What follows is an imaginative and darkly hilarious story of conspiracy, revenge, and the strange life and death of Los Verticalés that both captures the wonderful weirdness of community and the bonds that tie us together.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062957740
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	01/07/2020
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Sean Adams is a graduate of Bennington College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His fiction has appeared in Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Normal School, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Arkansas International, and elsewhere. He lives in Des Moines, Iowa with his wife, Emma, and their various pets.

Editorial Reviews

…Sean Adams is thankfully less interested in allegory than in harnessing its strange contrasts to create cutting satire…The novel's concern is not the instinct to form groups, but what people do within them. Its characters…suffer because of their idiosyncratic flaws and choices. They manipulate, scheme and consolidate power. But they also care, love and sacrifice. The suggestion is of a lingering quality to human nature. Whether clustered in a vertical utopia or scavenging its collapse, people, for better or for worse—and in The Heap it is frequently the latter—will always act like people.

The New York Times Book Review - Wil Medearis

"Cutting satire . . . . A compelling narrative with unexpected twists and darkly comic turns." — New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice

“Like Snowpiercer's train, a George Saunders amusement park, or the fractured cityscape from a Donald Barthelme story, The Heap's Los Verticalés is a sardonic monument to our decadent culture teetering on the brink of collapse. A wry, inventive, and highly original debut.” — Chandler Klang Smith, author of The Sky Is Yours

"The Heap is dizzying in scale, but at its heart it's an endearing and downright fun story about a man who defies all odds to reestablish a familial link that's been sundered by technology, catastrophe and commerce. . . . The first great science fiction novel of 2020, The Heap is sharp, acidic and sweet." — NPR

“Somehow both timely and timeless, The Heap explores with heart what it means to live in the wake of strange new kinds of catastrophe.” — Seth Fried, author of The Municipalists

"Darkly funny and dystopian." — New York Post

“As intellectually playful as the best of Thomas Pynchon and as sardonically warm as the best of Kurt Vonnegut, The Heap is both a hilarious send-up of life under late capitalism and a moving exploration of the peculiar loneliness of the early 21st century. A masterful and humane gem of a novel.” — Shaun Hamill, author of A Cosmology of Monsters

“An incandescent, melancholy satire. . . . Fans of Borges and other inventive but piercing stories will revel in this offbeat novel.” — Publishers Weekly

"A sharp, evocative look at human arrogance and the sense of community we build after tragedy." — Library Journal

“[The Heap] recalls elaborate dystopian scenes found in Terry Gillam films. . . . Irresistibly clever commentary steeped in wit and secrets.”  — Booklist

“A dystopian nightmare that is metaphorical in nature but has a compelling story. . . . A vision of the future that gives the working class a chance to get even.” — Kirkus Reviews

"A deeply weird but poignant novel about the extended family we discover amongst the rubble and ruin of a rich man's folly." — Locus

From the Publisher

Somehow both timely and timeless, The Heap explores with heart what it means to live in the wake of strange new kinds of catastrophe.

Seth Fried

"Darkly funny and dystopian."

New York Post

"The Heap is dizzying in scale, but at its heart it's an endearing and downright fun story about a man who defies all odds to reestablish a familial link that's been sundered by technology, catastrophe and commerce. . . . The first great science fiction novel of 2020, The Heap is sharp, acidic and sweet."

NPR

Like Snowpiercer's train, a George Saunders amusement park, or the fractured cityscape from a Donald Barthelme story, The Heap's Los Verticalés is a sardonic monument to our decadent culture teetering on the brink of collapse. A wry, inventive, and highly original debut.

Chandler Klang Smith

[The Heap] recalls elaborate dystopian scenes found in Terry Gillam films. . . . Irresistibly clever commentary steeped in wit and secrets.” 

Booklist

As intellectually playful as the best of Thomas Pynchon and as sardonically warm as the best of Kurt Vonnegut, The Heap is both a hilarious send-up of life under late capitalism and a moving exploration of the peculiar loneliness of the early 21st century. A masterful and humane gem of a novel.

Shaun Hamill

"Darkly funny and dystopian."

New York Post

[The Heap] recalls elaborate dystopian scenes found in Terry Gillam films. . . . Irresistibly clever commentary steeped in wit and secrets.” 

Booklist

"A deeply weird but poignant novel about the extended family we discover amongst the rubble and ruin of a rich man's folly."

Locus

"Cutting satire . . . . A compelling narrative with unexpected twists and darkly comic turns."

New York Times Book Review

Four excellent narrators bring humor, heart, and pathos to this audiobook. In a dystopian near future, a salvage crew endlessly digs through The Heap, the remains of Los Verticalés, a 500-story residential tower that collapsed into ruin. While the plot develops into a madcap conspiracy, narrators David Sadzin, Allyson Ryan, Sarah Naughton, and Todd Haberkorn rotate between the characters and effectively capture their unique personalities and perspectives. Among the salvage crew is Orville Anders, who’s looking for his brother, a radio host who survived the collapse and is broadcasting from inside The Heap. Joining Orville are Hans, a photographer documenting the massive project, and Lydia, who has political aspirations within the local community. The narrators also add texture with their nuanced readings of “The Later Years,” excerpts from former residents that chronicle the tower’s rise and fall. A.T.N. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2020 - AudioFile

Four excellent narrators bring humor, heart, and pathos to this audiobook. In a dystopian near future, a salvage crew endlessly digs through The Heap, the remains of Los Verticalés, a 500-story residential tower that collapsed into ruin. While the plot develops into a madcap conspiracy, narrators David Sadzin, Allyson Ryan, Sarah Naughton, and Todd Haberkorn rotate between the characters and effectively capture their unique personalities and perspectives. Among the salvage crew is Orville Anders, who’s looking for his brother, a radio host who survived the collapse and is broadcasting from inside The Heap. Joining Orville are Hans, a photographer documenting the massive project, and Lydia, who has political aspirations within the local community. The narrators also add texture with their nuanced readings of “The Later Years,” excerpts from former residents that chronicle the tower’s rise and fall. A.T.N. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2020 - AudioFile

2019-12-09
When the largest and most audacious housing project in history crashes to the ground, a new culture is born, for good or bad.

Adams' debut novel is a dystopian nightmare that is metaphorical in nature but has a compelling story, a recognizable villain, and a few key characters whose personality traits make them interesting. The setting is Los Verticalés, a nearly 500-story architectural marvel of its time; or, to be more accurate, what's left of it after the unprecedented housing complex crashed to the ground under its own weight. What the salvage crew unaffectionately calls "the Heap" is nothing but an enormous pile of rubble punctuated by the occasional dead guy. Weirdly, there's a single survivor: DJ Bernard Anders, who mysteriously still has electricity and broadcasts regularly to a wide audience from somewhere in the rubble. Meanwhile, interstitial excerpts from a history of "the Vert" titled The Later Years give context to the monolith's rise and fall. The novel's story centers on the "Dig Hands," the poor souls recruited to shovel their way through the biggest recycling project in the world. The link to Bernard is his brother, Orville, digging relentlessly and carrying on nightly conversations with his brother over the radio. Orville's companions include Hans, the photographer who emotionally captures his subject, and Lydia, who is trying to work her way up the community's political structure. There are a couple of bad guys here—Hal Cornish, from the company that runs the radio station, wants Orville to converse with his trapped brother for the highest ratings, at any cost, while Peter Thisbee, the mogul who built the Vert in the first place, plays at redemption while working his own machinations to profit off his fallen monolith. It's distressing that we have so many bleak visions of the future these days but at least here people are given a chance to dig themselves out of the hole that the upper class made.

A vision of the future that gives the working class a chance to get even.

Kirkus Reviews