2004
ISBN 1-880713-34-9
$14.00

About the author

Read an excerpt

A scientist creates gilled human monstrosities that are also avatars of the possibility of imaginative transcendence. Dark dreams liberate and dismember simultaneously, invoking a freedom beyond the body that can only appear through the act of mutilation. Mark Wallace's Dead Carnival rages against a world in which corpsed imagination roams in the form of the everyday. Experimentation in language and in the laboratory produce equally vertiginous results-a hammerhead shark-human who insists on sacrosanct purity as a justification for revenge, westerns that leave their grained and scratched frames strewn across a desert landscape, a lost town with a museum full of mutant skeletons, a ghost-mound of white prairie dogs, Dante's Beatrice wandering through a contemporary purgatory, bodies that transmute into dreams and weave themselves into text, and much more.

Wallace's prose is an eloquent challenge to the arbitrary boundaries that we place between novelistic prose, philosophy, dream, fantasy, pop cultural artifact, and poetry. To enter this book is to fragment and dissect, to become a reader with scissors suturing meaning together while cutting flesh fragments into the void. Read this text and become part of this beautiful dead-corpse carnival in which the dead circulate through language and through us.

In these worlds, ideas and narratives flurry madly and wink out like sparks, the dead walk, and the monstrous is never far away. Part Lovecraft, part de Sade, part B-horror movie, part philosophy, Dead Carnival is a schizophrenic and uniquely American Novel of Ideas.
--Brian Evenson

Mark Wallace writes like John Hawkes dreaming of Paul Bowles having a gothic nightmare.
--Ron Sukenick