Benjamin

IN ONE L.A. MOTEL ROOM, A COSMIC QUEST IS ABOUT BEGIN. . . . Edgar Award nominee and Philip K. Dick Awardwinner Ben H. Winters (ECs Cruel Universe, The Last Policeman Trilogy) and rising star Leomacs (ECs Epitaphs from the Abyss,Basketful of Heads) unravel a three-part, prestige format series exploring the hallucinatory second life of a brilliant author who imagined our desperate future but never imagined hed become part of it . . . More than just a writer, more than just a science-fiction icon, BENJAMIN J. Carp was a cultural revolutionary. Across 44 novels and hundreds of short storiesincluding the counterculture classic The Man They Couldnt EraseCarp pushed the boundaries of literary respectability for the sci-fi genre and his readers perception of reality itself . . . until decades of amphetamine abuse and Southern California excess finally ended a mind-bending career that always just escaped mainstream success. He died in 1982. Until 2025 . . . when BENJAMIN J. Carp awakens, alive, in a burned-out motel on the fringes of Los Angeles. He remembers dying. He knows he shouldnt exist. Is he a dream? A robot? A ghost? A clone? A simulation? In his own time, Carp pondered all of these scenarios intensely through his fictionand, now, as he treks from Studio City to Venice Beach and onward into the paranoid sprawl of 21st-century Los Angeles, he will be called to investigate his greatest mystery yet: himself. In the tradition of Philip K. Dicks A Scanner Darkly and Thomas Pynchons Inherent Vice comes a uniquely fascinating and hilariously deranged excursion into the metatextual nexus where existence and oblivion, past and future, genius and madness, and glitter and grim reality all meet just beyond Hollywood Boulevard . . .