BENJAMIN HC (11 Mar Release)

IN ONE L.A. MOTEL ROOM¸ A COSMIC QUEST IS ABOUT TO BEGIN . . . More than just a writer¸ more than just a science-fiction icon¸ Benjamin J. Carp was a cultural revolutionary. Over the course of 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 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. From 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¸ Ghostlore) 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.