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 you'll 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

 

Ted Pelton lives in Buffalo, New York where he writes fiction and criticism and teaches literature and writing at Medaille College. In 1994, he received an NEA Literature Fellowship in Fiction. In 2000, he founded Starcherone Books, which publishes new innovative short fiction and reprints of classic experimental works.