A Room in Dodge City
Alum - Creative Writing at The New School
Alternating Current Press, 2017
“David Lynch meets Neil Gaiman meets Samuel Beckett and the Theater of the Absurd. Just as Dodge City is a place the narrator can never leave, Rice’s book sucks you in and doesn’t let you walk out of it intact, either.”
—Nick Antosca, author of The Girlfriend Game, Midnight Picnic, & Fires
“With a draftsman’s hand and a psychonaut’s eye, Rice has mapped the alien precinct in which we already live. I’ve never encountered a book so strange yet so familiar. Writers such as William Burroughs and Samuel Delany may have helped prepare the ground, but this high-speed, controlled drift across it is all Rice’s own.”
—Joanna Ruocco, author of Dan & A Compendium of Domestic Incidents
A Room in Dodge City follows a nameless drifter into an American heart of darkness. In this nightmarish version of the historic Dodge City, mythic beasts crawl out of the woodwork; bizarre rituals are enacted; and death is never the end. Equal parts humor and horror show, David Leo Rice’s novel combines the mundaneness of modern life—motels, strip malls, temp jobs—with something stranger, darker, and more eternal. Told through linked vignettes that read like metaphoric fairytales gone wrong, Dodge City consumes the reader just as it slowly consumes the drifter, leaving all to wonder whether any of us can ever truly escape this world—or our own.
Illustrated throughout by artist Christina Collins.