American Neolithic

by Terence Hawkins, John Crowley (Foreword by)

Overview

"American Neolithic is a stunning, alarming, and deftly crafted read that has author Terence Hawkins's novel achieving a similar literary status to the likes of George Orwell's 1984"--Midwest Book Review.

It's the day after tomorrow.

America has become a Police State Lite. The Patriot Amendments have swallowed the Bill of Rights. Creationism trumps science. The Patriot Tribunal overrules the Supreme Court. And the drones of the Homeland Police are always watching.

Enter Blingbling. Brought to official attention by a hip-hop murder, he's foreign-looking, undocumented, and apparently homeless. His hard-boiled lawyer, Raleigh, keeps the Homeland cops at arm's length until a routine DNA test exposes a secret thousands of years old--one that threatens to destroy his client, his career, and much more.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781733647427
Publisher:	Calliope Group
Publication date:	11/04/2019
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	220
Sales rank:	1,014,699
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Terence Hawkins was born in Uniontown PA, a onetime coal-mining hub featured in American Rust and Night of the Living Dead. He graduated from Yale and the University of Wisconsin Law School. In 2012, he became the founding director of the Yale Writers' Conference, which he developed and managed through 2015. Since that time, he has served as the director of the Company of Writers. In 2018, he became the prose editor of Blue Mountain Review. His first novel, The Rage of Achilles, (Casperian, 2009) is an account of the Iliad informed by Julian Jaynes's theory of the bicameral mind. Turing's Graveyard, a collection of his short stories, will appear in 2020 from Running Wild Press.

John Crowley is the World Fantasy Award author of Little, Big.

Editorial Reviews

"The political and social commentary throughout this unique novel is razor-sharp, as are uses of imagery and symbolism. The disturbing contrast of nonviolent, contemplative and deeply compassionate Blingbling to the brutality, apathy and ignorance of modern-day America is profoundly moving...A towering work of speculative fiction that will have readers rethinking what it means to be human." Kirkus Reviews

"This is a one-of-a-kind novel...Terry Hawkins is a bold and fearless writer." Tom Perrotta, author of The Leftovers and Mrs. Fletcher

"Terence Hawkins's American Neolithic is a special novel; thematically rich, it also provides all the pleasures of a hard-boiled thriller. The unique premise and lovingly crafted characters will stay with you long after you've closed the book." Rain Taxi

"You will be amazed at Terence Hawkins' prodigious imagination, his Bowie-sharp wit, and the skill with which he tells a story that's as morally urgent as it is satirically diverting." Julia Glass, author of Three Junes and And the Dark Sacred Night

"American Neolithic is overflowing with ideas, the narrative running on overdrive at all times. Reading this book felt like a fever dream, which I mean in the best possible way, an extrasensory experience." Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang

"American Neolithic, while toggling between two very different voices, is bone-dry, witty, affecting, and never less than riveting." Teddy Wayne, author of Loner and The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

From the Publisher

★ 2014-09-11
This powerful cautionary tale mixes political satire and legal thrills in a near-future America where the existence of a Neanderthal threatens a government that has devolved into a "trailer park theocracy."When jaded Manhattan lawyer Raleigh is hired to represent a suspect accused of murdering a popular rap artist, he understands immediately that the case could interest Homeland Security. His client—nicknamed Blingbling—is described as a "crazy homeless retarded guy"; he has no Social Security number, license or Homeland passport. In a country where Patriot Amendments have been added to the Constitution to radically limit civil liberties and give Homeland Police unlimited jurisdiction over cases concerning national security, Raleigh knows that if Blingbling is involved in any terrorist activity, his own career—and his freedom—could be at stake. But the case becomes exponentially more complicated when a DNA test shows that Blingbling isn't human: He's a Neanderthal who, with the few others of his kind, has been secretly living in a "Nest" in an abandoned building in New York's SoHo district. When, in an attempt to dismiss the case, Raleigh goes public with the revelation, he finds himself at the center of a national firestorm over the theory of evolution. "The mouth-breathers amended the Constitution just one step short of criminalizing modern science and here you go proving evolution," Raleigh tells Blingbling. The political and social commentary throughout this unique novel is razor-sharp, as are uses of imagery and symbolism. The disturbing contrast of nonviolent, contemplative and deeply compassionate Blingbling to the brutality, apathy and ignorance of modern-day America is profoundly moving. One standout among many is a brilliant sequence in which Raleigh attends a bum fight—"illegal, but illegal the way whiskey was in 1924. And I make my living off the kind of people who in the Coolidge administration would have been meeting trawlers full of booze at midnight on the North Fork. Well, kind of like them. Just worse."A towering work of speculative fiction that will have readers rethinking what it means to be human.

Kirkus Reviews