equus press
a novel, by Louis Armand
ISBN 978-0-9571213-3-1. Paperback. 222pp. Publication date: April 2013. Equus Press: London.
Order from Bookshop.org, from Barnes and Noble, or via Print-on-Demand (paperback only); or try the Kindle edition.
The dog days of 1983. The bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut. Ronald Reagan and Yuri Andropov, dancing into the sunset. Hess, Ascher and Wolf are orphans chance has brought together in a small Baltic seaside town. Twenty years on, the long hot summer of the Israel-Lebanon War. Hess, a down-on-his-luck screenwriter, finds himself in the Mediterranean, drinking to forget a wasted marriage. Wolf, haunted by his father’s murder, is drawn into the nebulous world of international terrorism. When Ascher, a failed artist, commits suicide, all the stakes are changed. Or are they? With the Cold War, sex and punk rock throbbing in the background, Hess must confront his past, seeking to salvage dignity from defeat.
“Another dark masterpiece from the harbinger of ‘The gaping futility.'”—Jim Ruland (author of Forest of Fortune)
“Baudelaire’s mellow ‘living proof of our immortality’ done in the high pulp style.”—Richard Marshall, 3:AM Magazine
“Then along comes Louis Armand’s Canicule. It’s not exactly a New Wave novel. It’s brand new.”—Sean Carswell, Flagstaff Live
“In CANICULE we might think of Louis Armand as carrying out a Ballardian critique of modernity, where the beach is a wasteland and the balconied hotel rooms are ruins, and the people who go about amongst them are dazed and shell-shocked survivors who do not yet know that everything around them has been destroyed.”—Bayard Godsave, Necessary Fiction
“Armand may pay tribute to filmmaking, to the medium that is film, but he knows from writing and he writes, even speaking of and to cinema in a way that cinema itself, locked in images, cannot…”—Spencer Dew, decomP magazinE
“The novel’s elasticity feels like an experimental film, spliced together on a dusty Steenbeck. Constantly moving forward and backward in time, Armand refuses to coddle his audience, and the result is a tale full of irony, repetition, and alcohol-fueled remorse.”—Benjamin Woodard, Numéro Cinq
“A portrait of three victims of modern psychological warfare, human primates intellectually eroded by bombardment with pop culture.”—Jim Chaffee, nthposition
“Armand uses language to paint a picture just as vividly as if we were watching this unfold on screen… This is a highly recommended read.”—Kristen Valentine, Black Heart Review
“A homage to 70s New German Cinema, Baader-Meinhof, and the Man Without Qualities… undercut with the bitter irony of a History that does nothing but repeat, like an orphaned Oedipus Complex on Zoloft.”—Goodreads
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