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A fierce, searing response to the chaos of the war on terror-an utterly original and blackly comic debut
In the early years of the Iraq War, a severely burned boy appears on a remote rock formation in the Akkad Valley. A shadowy, powerful group within the U.S. government speculates: Who is he? Where did he come from? And, crucially, what does he know? In pursuit of that information, an interrogator is summoned from his prison cell, and a hideous and forgotten apparatus of torture, which extracts "perfect confessions," is retrieved from the vaults. Over the course of four days, a cavalcade of voices rises up from the Akkad boy, each one striving to tell his or her own story. Some of these voices are familiar: Osama bin Laden, L. Paul Bremer, Condoleezza Rice, Mark Zuckerberg. Others are less so. But each one has a role in the world shaped by the war on terror. Each wants to tell us: This is the world as it exists in our innermost selves. This is what has been and what might be. This is The Infernal.
In the early years of the Iraq War, a severely burned boy appears on a remote rock formation in the Akkad Valley. A shadowy, powerful group within the U.S. government speculates: Who is he? Where did he come from? And, crucially, what does he know? In pursuit of that information, an interrogator is summoned from his prison cell, and a hideous and forgotten apparatus of torture, which extracts "perfect confessions," is retrieved from the vaults. Over the course of four days, a cavalcade of voices rises up from the Akkad boy, each one striving to tell his or her own story. Some of these voices are familiar: Osama bin Laden, L. Paul Bremer, Condoleezza Rice, Mark Zuckerberg. Others are less so. But each one has a role in the world shaped by the war on terror. Each wants to tell us: This is the world as it exists in our innermost selves. This is what has been and what might be. This is The Infernal.
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Reviews
"Doten has written a ravishingly mad post-Bust riposte to the collaboratively written Internet text-- the Wiki, which doesn't document facts so much as it documents the process by which 'facts' are generated and then perpetually overwritten."
Josh Cohen, Harper's Magazine
"In Doten's artfully deranged debut novel, the 'war on terror' is revisited as a feverish science-fiction odyssey. . . . Doten frames his post-historic 'memory index' in virtuosic, antic prose, but his goal is neither purely satire nor surrealism for its own sake. Rather, [The Infernal] constructs a new language to confront atrocity and becomes in the bargain a story that truly thinks outside the
Publishers Weekly
"Mark Doten has fashioned a thrilling, idiosyncratic attack on the mytho-historical madness of our time. The Infernal is a brave, crazy, magnetic debut."
Sam Lipsyte