BENJAMIN #1 (OF 3) CVR A CHRISTIAN WARD (18 Jun Release)

IN ONE L.A. MOTEL ROOM¸ A COSMIC QUEST IS ABOUT BEGIN. . . . Edgar Award nominee and Philip K. Dick Award–winner Ben H. Winters (EC’s Cruel Universe¸ The Last Policeman Trilogy) and rising star Leomacs (EC’s Epitaphs from the Abyss¸ Refrigerator Full of Heads) unravel a three-part¸ prestige format series exploring the hallucinatory second life of a brilliant author who imagined our desperate future but never imagined he’d become part of it . . . More than just a writer¸ more than just a science-fiction icon¸ BENJAMIN J. Carp was a cultural revolutionary. Across 44 novels and hundreds of short stories—including the counterculture classic The Man They Couldn’t Erase—Carp pushed the boundaries of literary respectability for the sci-fi genre and his readers’ perception of reality itself . . . until decades of amphetamine abuse and Southern California excess finally ended a mind-bending career that always just escaped mainstream success. He died in 1982. Until 2025 . . . when BENJAMIN J. Carp awakens¸ alive¸ in a burned-out motel on the fringes of Los Angeles. He remembers dying. He knows he shouldn’t exist. Is he a dream? A robot? A ghost? A clone? A simulation? In his own time¸ Carp pondered all of these scenarios intensely through his fiction—and¸ now¸ as he treks from Studio City to Venice Beach and onward into the paranoid sprawl of 21st-century Los Angeles¸ he will be called to investigate his greatest mystery yet: himself. In the tradition of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly and Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice comes a uniquely fascinating and hilariously deranged excursion into the metatextual nexus where existence and oblivion¸ past and future¸ genius and madness¸ and glitter and grim reality all meet just beyond Hollywood Boulevard . . .