Book description
Ricky Rice is a middle-aged hustler with a lingering junk habit, a
bum knee, and a haunted mind. The sole survivor of a suicide cult, he
spends his days scraping by as a porter at a bus depot in Utica, New
York. Until one day a letter arrives, reminding him of a vow he once
made and summoning him to Vermont's remote Northeast Kingdom to
fulfill it.
There, Ricky is inducted into a band of paranormal investigators
comprised of former addicts and petty criminals, all of whom have at
some point in their wasted lives heard the Voice: a murmur on the
wind, a disembodied shout, a whisper in an empty room. All these may
or may not have been messages from God. Their mission is to find the
Voice -- and figure out what it wants.
Big Machine takes us from Ricky's childhood in a matrilineal
cult housed in a New York City tenement to his near-death experience
in the basement of an Iowa house owned by a man named Murder. And to
his final confrontation with an army of true believers -- and with his
own past.
Infused with the wonder of a disquieting dream and laced with
Victor LaValle's fiendish comic sensibility, Big Machine is a
mind-rattling mystery about doubt, faith, and the monsters we carry
within us.
Big Machine named:
American Book Award 2010
Shirley Jackson Award 2009 - Winner - Best Novel
10 Best Books of 2009 -- Publisher's Weekly
Favorite Fiction of 2009 -- Chicago Tribune
Best Science Fiction of 2009 -- Los Angeles Times
Best Science Fiction & Fantasy -- Washington Post
Most Valuable Fiction Book of 2009 -- The Nation
Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence 2010 Winner
Victor LaValle is the author of the short story collection Slapboxing
with Jesus and two novels, The Ecstatic and Slapboxing with Jesus. He
has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Whiting Writers'
Award, a United States Artists Ford Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship
and the key to Southeast Queens. He was raised in Queens, New York. He
can be kind of hard to reach.
