Kris Saknussemm Zanesville

Kris Saknussemm Zanesville is entirely unique.

This disquietingly inspired first novel takes us 30 or 40 years into the future, into a nation that is haunted by its own hyperreality, wracked with political and social crises, and both dangerously and hilariously alive with biotech monsters, psychological epidemics, insatiable commercialism and religious mania.

The novel is not only about theme parks and religious visions, it is both. At times nightmarish, it has moments of excruciatingly funny satire. A big canvas epic (try a stadium size plasma screen), it is also an intimate story of love, loss, personal suffering and the search for redemption, hope and an enduring sense of family and purpose in a world gone mad.

The result is an entirely unique fairy tale-gospel for our genetically

engineered, totemic dream tribal culture. Step right up. If you can find a more startling and inventive book published in the last ten years, tell me.

Zanesville

Kris Saknussemm

Villard, Oct 2005, $14.95, 496 pp.

ISBN 0812974166

He wakes up confused as he is not sure who he is, or why he is in the middle of what he assumes is a distorted Central Park, nor how he became middle-aged. He vaguely recalls some childhood moments though they are not lucid and even his humongous by even Deep Throat standard's maleness seems more like an anime.

Dubbed Clearfather he travels across America seeking to find himself, but receives no assistance as the federal government has been outsourced to the monopoly drug manufacturer, Vitessa Cultporation. Instead he uncovers disposal sex, massive drug-addiction, combative mutilated lesbian motorcycle gangs, organ donors for breakfast, gay heavyweights and the probable creator, but no Clearfather.

ZANESVILLE is an interesting futuristic picture that extrapolates the problems of current day America with two trends losing the drug wars (from within) and outsourcing the entire federal government (Mussolini would enjoy this vision). The panorama is bleak as groups battle one another for a crumb while Big Brother is the future corporation that takes on legendary cult status. The excess battle scenes take away from the prime hyperbole of connecting the dots of the age of Saknussemm with the troubles impacting Americans during the Administration of the first MBA president. Mindful of El Topo, readers of dark gloom and doom allegory thrillers will want to read this cautionary tale.

Harriet Klausner