The Great American Suction

THE GREAT AMERICAN SUCTION is a dark, surreal, deadpan-comic novel about a reformed glue huffer who copes with the emerging mysteries of his life—a backwoods conspiracy against him, a woman impersonating his ex-wife—by undertaking a project as epic as it is absurd: the creation of a thirty-foot monument, a secular shrine of sorts, made entirely of stacked trash. Authority Shaker has somehow, against all expectations, survived into his mid-thirties. He has set aside the early debauchery of his youth and now maintains a modest existence mowing lawns in rural Ohio. Shaker's tranquility is soon punctured when he is persecuted by mysterious forces that seem to be acting in retribution for long-forgotten sins Shaker committed somewhere in his hazy, drug-clouded past. The provocations start small: Someone breaks into his house and rearranges his furniture. His dishes get washed, his apartment cleaned. As the passive-aggressive harassment escalates, Shaker stumbles onto a...