Forthcoming November 2011 from Black Coffee Press
(click to download chapters 1 & 2 as .pdf)
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Jackson Jacoby, a twenty-two year old boy without a mother of his own finds a plea in a newspaper from a woman, begging for her runaway son to return home. He calls, pretends to be the son, and embarks on a journey to visit this mother, spreading to strangers along the way tales of his participation in the human appendage trade, the history of his missing ear, and anything else that might validate his life like, he discovers, the love of a mother could. |
Advance Praise“Brilliant…one of the most amazing fiction concepts I’ve ever read.” -Rayo Casablanca, author of 6 Sick Hipsters and Very Mercenary (Kensington) |
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“In Torch, Caleb J. Ross writes fearlessly, never shying away from the wild, insane places where his fertile imagination leads him. The first half a twisted take on small-town aimlessness, the second half the American road novel from hell, the book is ultimately a darkly comedic evaluation of a generation of motherless men.” Joey Goebel, author of Torture the Artist and Commonwealth (MacAdam/Cage) |
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ABNA 2008 praise“A stirring novel, this extraordinary work plays upon the reader’s willingness to suspend disbelief and turns it on its ear. From the opening imagery set in the incinerator of a beef packing plant through a visit to a roadside museum of body parts through a seemingly interminable trek from a nondescript small town in the middle of the country to Delaware, the novel chronicles the encounters of a narrator who can’t keep his story straight with a cast of drifters many of whom are obsessed in finding their long-lost mothers. The narrator, Jackson Jacoby, tells anyone who will listen the story of how he lost his ear in a childhood torch accident. His storytelling, curiosity, and occasional empathy make him a compelling character. However, he is also prone to unpredictable turns of vandalism and cruelty. In a story he retells often (with slight differences in each new telling), he describes stealing an ear from a sleeping truck driver named Marion Garza and then attempting to sell it. In another example of Jackson’s deviant behavior, he impersonates a runaway in phone calls to the boy’s mother who is desperate for her son to come home. The mother, eager to believe she’s speaking to her son, plays along with Jackson’s ruse. The novel casts a similar spell on its readers. Covering ground similar to the works of Sherman Alexie and Chuck Palahniuk, this is an author worth keeping an eye on.” Publishers Weekly |
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| Other Praise |
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| “We know Marion Garza, hero and antihero. Whether we see him as cursed Hercules or noble Hector, he is certainly in Hell. Welcome to the grotesque, inverted world where the working day is the rest of the world’s sleep, where violence is the only means of avenging cruelty, and the price of vision is blindness. Literally it is Garza who begins the great alimentary canal of the beef processing plant that nourishes the ravenous appetite of a contemporary culture the rest of us inhabit on the other side of the drive-through window. Metaphorically, Garza is the executioner of our conscience. Steadfast, he slices through the last twitchings of our resistance. He machinistically conducts our ritual sacrifice nightly at the BWP packing plant, moving between the letting and the burning of blood. He is neither human nor animal, consumer nor consumed. Then, standing on the roof of the plant one night, surveying the steaming stench of a sulfurous city, Garza recognizes the narrative and takes into his hands to invert the binary of sacrifice and redemption. Ross’s prose stuns and singes in these opening chapters that set a killer on the loose and juxtaposes this to the motherless, cultureless Jackson and Creg in the Laundromat that maintains market dominance through dirty tricks. “Killed the bitch,” Jackson lingers over a line as he tells Creg the legend of Garza while Creg scans Telemundo for his mother. Jackson and Craig are proverbial sons of bitches here, whose identities the reader and the characters themselves will learn in the coming pages. Ross presents two Americas we know: the banal, grass-fed suburb, gutted of humanity, and the post-apocalptic, post-colonial hell-scape of low-wage ethnic labor. Both are ripe for the sanitizing obliteration of the torch when Ross places it in Garza’s hands. In the path of his reckoning, the other characters will be reconciled to their roots or ripped free of “the trap” that is this place and the identities it offers. There is a delicious anticipation in knowing Garza’s rampage has begun, that he moves without witness, that he is among us now, that he is us.” | |
| “This work has a heft to it that seeps into your skin, and refuses to dissipate. It resonates.” | |
| “The setting and characters reminds me of No Country for Old Men; the style hints of Kafka. Ross appears to be an art writer with a gift for spinning beauty from the most compelling shades of disgust.” | |
| “I’d read further, not because the excerpt has created questions I burn to have answered, but because Caleb Ross is clearly so skilled a writer I can’t imagine him not delivering the balance of the required elements in chapters to come. Five stars and advance to the final 100.” | |
| “Cormac McCarthy would be jealous.” | |
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“[Torch] a tight, unwashed romp with an experienced professional of flexible morals who pushes all the right buttons to make you squirm and thank them for it in the end. From truckstops to snow mazes to body-part museums, with limping lot lizards and Latina-logging launderers and moneyed mourning matriarchs, our cauliflower-eared passenger takes to America’s roadside hazards in search of “futile game” and a willing audience for his near-lucid tales. Yeah, I know Marion Garza – he’s got my ear.” |
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“Caleb Ross’ characters are full of life, with distinct voices, inhabiting a world that feels as real as down the street from your home.“ |
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| “There’s a great blend of melancholy and subtle menace that makes you feel like you’re sitting around a camp fire listening to a well told folk tale or urban myth. Who doesn’t like to hear those? Thumbs up for this one.” | |
| “Caleb Ross displays a strong sense of character in his first novel, creating not only memorable and lovable characters, but characters with eccentricities that seem to enlarge our own view of what the world can and will be, reminding me of the work of O’Connor or Boyle, where each character’s strangeness points to a lack we all hold. Ross’s command of the language, and his humorous take on somewhat tragic events, will take him far, I believe. I look forward to finishing this work. These are my preliminary thoughts. Here’s to many more works of distinction during Ross’s path as a writer.” | |
| “As how Palahniuk renders his minimalism with a gay pace, and Stephen Graham Jones renders his with nigh-inexplicable poetry, Ross reaches beyond the inherent banality of most modern writing (whose prose seems to imply a natural human tongue, with all the flaccid colloquial passages such a thing entails), to edge a prose that is at once lucid and enjoyable.” | |
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| Sample Chapters | |
| Status: | forthcoming November 2011 from Black Coffee Press |
| Genre: | Literature – dark, humorous,road trip |
| Words: | 73,899 |
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