Pay as you go A fable

Johnson's unbridled debut runs in circles of accelerating grandiosity and lunacy. Slide has been in the big city of Polis for two months and feels marooned in the chaos. He's low man on the totem pole at the barber shop where he works and is constantly at odds with his quirky roommates, Eustace and Calumet. Abundant oddballs float through his orbit, like the florid novelist Sir Artem Borand and Madame Lupont, the maternal manager at Calumet's previous place of employment. Polis, with its subway, rats, and mean streets, resembles New York or Chicago, but is purposely off-center enough to accommodate the outrageous characters that Slide encounters when he moves out of his awkward living situation. Just as Polis is an unknown city, Johnson makes Slide a blank slate with no documented past. A parade of larger-than-life characters traipse through his life, and he becomes a soldier of sorts, a gangster, and eventually a celebrity under the tutelage of the wise seductress Monica Iñes. It's a familiar template, and Johnson meets its challenges with panache and imagination. Piquant titles, like "That Lady Is Swallowing a Sword," are dropped intermittently into Slide's odyssey, underscoring its irony and reinforcing its episodic nature. This big, buoyant adventure feels both ebulliently modern and transparently classical. Agent: Andrea Somberg, Harvey Klinger. (Oct.)

A madcap odyssey through the hellscape that is the metropolis of the near future. In a narrative that's long on rich description and has a playful love of language, the protagonist, Slide, is a young man with a problem: He lives in a seedy neighborhood where orphans steal his socks from the laundromat and one of his roommates sneaks into his bedroom at night for reasons unclear but likely untoward. Confronted by preteen hoodlums who demand to know which gang he swears allegiance to--"You run with Gulag? Uncle Death? One Shot? Diablos? Why're you wearing shorts?"--Slide decides to find his own place in a better part of Polis, about which his roomie warns him, "Polis is a friend to no one. It will only take what you give and spit back the bones, even your past, which it holds in reserve to taunt you." That's just so, and as Slide goes out into the city, moving from one pitiless zone to the next, he meets some extremely odd characters, such as a hot dog vendor who demands that he eat a suspicious-looking tube steak before proceeding ("Can't help the streets if you ain't buying the meats!") and a tent-city denizen decked out in two tracksuits even in the "June heat that wrapped our throats like pythons." Finally Slide reaches a part of town "where the light shines brighter," where the coffee shops have dozens of varieties of beans and "everyone's clothes were of a higher thread count"--a paradise that's inaccessible to him. Like Dante, Slide wanders in circles, soaking in weirdness, tragedies, and occasional flashes of beauty. And like Joyce, Johnson builds a world that, for all its improbabilities, is recognizable, with characters who dispense rough and memorable wisdom to help survive an ominous future; as one Uglygod instructs: "You don't step into a snake's mouth because it says it's got its teeth pulled." An inventive, beautifully written debut that will leave readers wanting more. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.