A funeral in Brooklyn begins
a chain of unpredictable, hallucinatory events. "It wasn't
the influence of drugs. I wasn't some bumpkin who could be deranged
by a little acid in my coffee . . . . This was different -- a
chance to actually live a life I knew would be different every
day, forever, until the end of time. Every day in itself could
be the end of all previously recorded time."
"Bhang is a magical book. I loved Fried's journey with Anders
and Sylvia, and the strange relation each had with the dead filmmaker
Antoine, and the silence that steals over him as though he had
just had sex, that unreal place of catching up. I admire the courage
with which Pelton tells what seems to be a simple tale, and instead
it sneaks up on the reader to flatten his ass into submission.
And I keep telling people about the drink that is so emotive that
when you taste it, you can experience the emotion of the person
who brews it up. I get just such sensual DNA from this book.
Kevin Killian, author of Little
Men and others
If John Cheever had done psychedelics he might have ended up with
Bhang. The casual easiness of the voice coupled with the strangeness
of the experience described, ends up being quite unexpected and
quite disarming.
Brian Evenson, author of Dark Property,
Altmann's Tongue
Bhang takes you out of the expected so quickly that youÕll
find yourself wondering where reality went. Like all the best
speculative fiction, when you've returned from the journey that
this tale leads you on, what you thought you knew will have turned
out to be something far stranger.-
Mark Wallace, editor, Submodern Fiction, and
author of Dead Carnival
"This amazing illusion expertly employs an a posteriori narrative
that develops within the reader a hairy relationship with the
text, like the one you have with your drug dealer. You never really
know if the bag weighs .... It's all in the 'what comes after'
that makes Pelton such a great read. From the inductive reasoning
based on observations alone, this story grows with -- you like
a tumor."
Geoffrey Gatza
