Novels
- This Is the Place (1980)
- Carnival Wolves (1998)
- The Ambidextrist (2002)
- The Bewildered (2005)
- My Abandonment (2009)
- The Shelter Cycle (2013)
- Klickitat (2016)
- Spells (2017)
- The Night Swimmers (2019)
- Passersthrough (2022)
Collections
- The Unsettling (1980)
Novels Book Covers
Collections Book Covers
Peter Rock Books Overview
This Is the Place
Sixty four feet tall and made of metal, the neon giant Wendover Will stands in front of the Stateline casino in Wendover, Nevada and faces east. The sign under him reads ‘This Is the Place.’ Over a hundred miles away in Utah, across the salt flats, stands the statue of Brigham Young, atop his monument, proclaiming the same thing, ‘This Is the Place.’This Is the Place is the sinister story of an aged and lonely blackjack dealer living in Wendover, who becomes obsessed with a nineteen year old Mormon girl from Bountiful, Utah. It is a story of love, perhaps doomed, told by an endearing misanthrope who may be delusional, but who has managed to coalesce his manias into an alternative understanding that lies somewhere between Wendover Will’s depravity and Brigham Young’s morality:’The dispute between Will and Brigham is not for me to settle, nor would I want it settled. The words hang over the salt flats, the most forsaken stretch of earth, a terrifying expanse of sheer space, white, like another planet, hard and smooth where nothing can live. This all sounds so grim! I’ve known joy and I’ll know it again. It’s just that it takes work to get up the words to talk about love.’His love leads him to do a terrible thing, and he tells this story to justify himself. His words, seductive and convincing, draw the reader into a world where the supernatural takes on new meaning. It is a haunting journey to the extreme realities of Las Vegas and Salt Lake City and many places in between. Above all, it is an odyssey to the depths of love.
Carnival Wolves
Alan Johnson is a man ill at ease among people and only slightly more comfortable with animals. His story begins in upstate New York with his rescue of an injured Dalmatian who ‘came down out of the sky and survived the fall, showed me how gradually I have fallen how I never touch, never really talk to another person…
I am hardly a person at all.’ The dog heals and is returned to its neglectful owner, but Alan Johnson steals it back and heads west in search of what it means to be human. As he crosses the United States, he moves through landscapes full of animals half tamed and people run wild: a fanatical taxidermist, a lonely woman raising tigers on her remote ranch, a tragic circus chimp named Rufus, contemporary polygamists, and the caretakers of boot camps for troubled youths. They are Carnival Wolves, manifestations of our attempts to tame what is dangerous and wild, distorted reflections of parts of ourselves. After a tortuous journey through various states of depravity and of America Alan Johnson ends up in California having reached a reconciliation of instincts and having found a human being he can love. A gripping, hallucinatory read, Carnival Wolves is a provocation, a plea for identification that questions the humanity of its readers and confirms Peter Rock as a unique literary talent.
The Ambidextrist
With gripping, restrained prose, The Ambidextrist finds beauty amid the gravel, dirt, and shadowed figures along Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River. This provocative novel follows Scott, a lonely drifter who earns money as a medical test subject and finds shelter in abandoned buildings on the riverfront. He first befriends Ray, a mysterious homeless man whose tenderness can t hide his unsavory tastes; next, he sets four adolescent boys on a series of increasingly dangerous dares. As these relationships develop and tangle, Scott proves he can outlast any bad first impression. dtifterAbout:Peter Rock was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. In addition to The Ambidextrist, he is the author of the novels Carnival Wolves and This Is the Place. The recipient of a 2000 NEA fellowship, he is working on new stories, novels, and film adaptations. He lives in Portland, Oregon, and teaches at Reed College.
The Bewildered
In Portland, Orgeon, three high school friends Leon, Chris and Kayla spend their time skateboarding studying foreign languages and classical music, and plotting a shared future that will avoid the superficiality they witness in the adult world around them. There is only one adult they admire, whom they suspect might hold secrets worth knowing. Natalie lives alone in a decrepit trailer, yet seems happy, and to have few concerns. As they befriend her she persuades them to harvest copper wire from the high tension electrical lines in the countryside around the city, until one day when there is an accident in which Leon is electrocuted. He appears to shake it off, yet soon despite his denials of anything being wrong his behavior comes to resemble Natalie’s in many ways. The mystery of what has happened to Leon and to Natalie leads Kayla and Chris on an adventure that takes them into the world of a remarkable group of people. These people live among us and are almost impossible to recognize, yet they possess different needs, and different powers. What they do not possess is insight into their condition, or any awareness that they are different. Others are left to wonder at and attempt to profit from the possibilities these people contain. Chris and Kayla are not alone in attempting to study, to use, and perhaps even to join their ranks.
My Abandonment
Thirteen year old Caroline has been raised and homeschooled by her father in a rigid code of behavior that allows them to survive, homeless, on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon. There they inhabit an elaborate cave shelter, wash in a nearby creek, use a makeshift septic system, and tend a garden. Once a week, they go to the city to buy groceries, attend church, and otherwise merge with the civilized world. Yet, despite their every precaution, one small mistake allows the authorities to discover them. Their forced relocation is only a brief respite in their flight from a world that can t understand them. Inspired by a true story and told through the startlingly sincere voice of young Caroline, My Abandonment is a mesmerizing, completely original story of survival, hope, and triumphant transformation.
The Unsettling
The Unsettling is a collection of thirteen stories that range across the cities and wildernesses of America. Realistic in setting and characterization, they attend to those startling moments when what we have understood as familiar is revealed as quite mysterious and foreign. These stories which have appeared in leading literary journals such as Zoetrope, Tin House and One Story are populated by strangers, ghosts, and other shadowy figures whose intentions may be sinister or quite the opposite. A lonely man saving library books from an outbreak of mold listens to his co worker’s tale of a blind woman and imbues it with his own sense of romance; a mysterious woman drives a Gold Firebird out of the desert, the television on the passenger seat playing ‘Rockford Files’ reruns, The Guinness Book of World Records on the dashboard; nights, a girl returns to her childhood home, spying on its new inhabitants, not realizing that they re quite aware of her surveillance; a Poe obsessed medical examiner constructs ornate scenes in an attempt to provoke hope in the forgotten lives of a dark and desperate city. These are stories of fascination, transformation, and the relation between the two.
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