Mystery in Spiderville

The main character--the protean and unkillable Spider Rembrandt--has six toes, sleeps in a grave, and dreams of congress with the pert and playful Reedy Buttons. Sucked into the vortex of Spider's philandering mind is a narrator--sometimes Spider's adversary, sometimes his victim--who lies upon a bed brooding on the absence of a nameless, brown-haired woman. He, too, is protean: full of passionate longings and homicidal tendencies. A surrealist film-noir that blends the forensic with the erotic, the seedy penny-dreadful and the lyric prose-poem, Mystery in Spiderville is one of the strangest, strongest and most arresting fictional debuts in years.