Soft Invasions

Anti-Oedipus Press • December 2017

Paperback: 5x8 • $12.95 • ISBN 978-0-9991535-0-5

Kindle: $5.95

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BOOK DESCRIPTION

Los Angeles, 1942. Psychoanalyst Maxwell McKinney and his wife Joan await the return of their son after the sinking of the USS Yorktown. With sections of the city under camouflage and ordinances against “enemy aliens,” McKinney is troubled by his ambivalent feelings for his son and fears that California will be invaded by the Japanese. A chance encounter with a man who appears to be his double, a screenwriter named Sid Starr, allows McKinney to confront his guilt. Entwined with McKinney, Starr finds that his own identity is at stake, and between the two, McKinney’s wife and son fight against their own destruction.

Punctuating great American fears, James Reich targets the zones of recent history where worlds and anxieties collide, among them UFOs, the Battle of Midway, Hollywood, psychoanalysis and Japanese internment. Soft Invasions is an existential thriller about cowardice, cruelty and betrayal that invokes David Cronenberg's body-horror classics as well as the cold California glamor of Joan Didion, the ominous noir of Horace McCoy and the psychic angst of Norman Mailer.

PRAISE FOR JAMES REICH

“Reich is a formidable writer. He brings his characters and events to life with cinematic clarity. His eye for detail makes even the familiar seem alien. Above all he gives form to the terrifying invisible nuclear air that envelopes us all." —MALCOLM MCNEILL, author of Observed While Falling

"James Reich writes like a demon." —MARY DEARBORN, author of The Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Henry Miller and Mailer: A Biography

“Blindingly brilliant and horrifyingly comic.” —THE HUFFINGTON POST

“Like Cormac McCarthy wandering a William Burroughs wasteland while blasting a riot grrrl mixtape on a scavenged Walkman!”
 —S. A. CRARY, director of Kill Your Idols

“Defiant, toothsome, and flaming with color, the voice of James Reich is one of the most exciting to emerge in recent years; he is both something new and something wholly real. If it is possible for a true underground writer to exist anymore, he is that author.”
 —STEPHEN E. ANDREWS, author of 100 Must-Read Science Fiction Novels

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JAMES REICH is the author of two previous novels Bombshell (2013) and I, Judas (2011) published by Soft Skull Press. He is a member of PEN American Center and the International Association of Crime Writers: North America. Reich is a regular contributor to Bold Type Magazine, The Rumpus, The Nervous Breakdown, Sensitive Skin, International Times, LitroNY, The Weeklings, Headzine, Sleeping Fish, and others. Since 2011, he has been a Creative Writing and Literature faculty member at Santa Fe University of Art and Design. He is also a founding member of the band Venus Bogardus (“Literate post-punk” The Wire; “World class” BBC Radio) with vinyl and CD releases on independent record labels in the US and UK. Reich was born in England in 1971 and has been a resident of the US since 2009. He is represented by Lippincott, Massie, McQuilkin literary agents. Visit him online at www.jamesreichbooks.com.

OTHER ANTI-OEDIPAL TITLES BY JAMES REICH

Mistah Kurtz! A Prelude to Heart of Darkness