breakfast at midnight

a novel, by Louis Armand

ISBN 978-0-9571213-0-0. Paperback.164pp Publication date: April 2012. Equus Press: London.

Order from Bookshop.org, from Barnes and Noble, or via Print on Demand (paperback only); or try the Kindle edition.

Shortlisted for the 2012 3:AM Novel of the Year Award. Longlisted for the 2012 Guardian Newspaper “Not the Booker” Prize.

Kafkaville. Blake is a pornographer who photographs corpses. Ten years ago, a young man becomes a fugitive when a redhead disappears on a bridge in the rain. Now, at the turn of the millennium, another redhead has turned up in the morgue, and the fugitive can’t get the dead girl’s image out of his head. For Blake, it’s all a game — a funhouse where denial is the currency, deceit is the grand prize, and all doors lead to one destination: murder. In the psychological noir-scape of Kafkaville, the rain never stops, and redemption is just another betrayal away…

“Breakfast at Midnight is a real delight, the kind of book that both embraces and breathes life into the standard tropes associated with the hard-boiled genre […], a twisted, brilliantly savage acid noir.”—Benjamin Woodard, Numéro Cinq

“Plus noir que noir.” Goodreads

“Armand has written a perfect modern noir, presenting Kafka’s Prague as a bleak, monochrome singularity of darkness, despair and edgy, dry existentialist hardboil.”—Richard Marshall, 3:AM Magazine

“While Jim Thompson […] provides inside views of the workings of intentional petty criminals, Armand gives us an inner view (note the difference) of someone not following such a path. The tool of his well crafted prose, necessary here to forge the events out of ambient background, is at odds with the ham-fisted telling of Thompson. Armand’s story worms its way out of an infested history beyond the control of the protagonist, wriggling unbidden like an ascaris from an anus. I would suggest that a more apt comparison might be Djuna Barnes.”—James Chaffee, nthposition

“Armand has done to Prague what Genet achieves in Our Lady of the Flowers. Breakfast at Midnight is the most savage book I’ve read in years.”—Jim Ruland, San Diego City Beat

“A pinball fever dream, sopping with sweat, booze, and sex, that bathes its confines in an unsettling atmosphere of grime.”—Benjamin Woodard, Rain Taxi

“Breakfast at Midnight is a wonderfully executed nod to Kafka’s special brand of disorienting surrealism.” —Michelle Bailat-Jones, Necessary Fiction

“A debauched, hallucinogenic noir… If Georges Simenon had smoked angel dust he might have come up with a style like this.”—Prague Post

“Armand has achieved a dazzling level of literary expression.”—Ladislav Nagy, Hospodářské noviny

“Mickey Spillane meets Georges Bataille on speed.”—Goodreads

“When you finish reading this book you want to take a shower for a very long long time.”—Reads by the Beach

“The sort of thing Iain Sinclair might write if he’d morphed with Chris Petit.”—Stewart Home (author of Red London)

“An impressionistic noir which teeters on the edge of being a thriller… Pitch-perfect.”—Robert Kiely, London Student

“Recommended for readers who like their books creepy and surreal.”—Goodreads

“A strange mixture of realism and almost schizophrenic fantasy, reloaded into a late 20th century context of border town bordellos, dysfunctional families, psychotic reactions and perverse sexuality.”—Phil Shoenfelt (author of Junkie Love)

LINKS TO EXCERPTS PUBLISHED ONLINE

Přítomnost

The Drill Press

www.equuspress.com