This politically pornographic tale of the collapse of the American republic is an outrageously over-the-top reworking of a seventeenth-century Chinese account of a despicable family, transplanted into contemporary and near-future Baltimore. It narrates the descent into corruption of an elite East Coast family following the demise of its naive paterfamilias. As both plot and family unravel, examples of social malaise such as illiterate texting and technocratic feudalism proliferate, until familial and political rottenness merge together, and America is lost.
Notices
“Harry Miller set himself a formidable formal challenge in generating this coolly rushing river of a novel, but what comes across on the page is pure delirious inventiveness and narrative verve, suggesting he could well have kept unfurling this fractal forever without loss of resolution.”
—Daniel Levin Becker, author of Many Subtle Channels
“The way this book was written is intellectually fascinating, and the story is deliciously and devastatingly amoral.”
—Quin Hillyer, author of The Accidental Prophet
“Meet Me at the RASCAL is an onslaught of sensational sentences in the form of a shamelessly campy extended family biography, a torpedo of words quick and witty as Candide. We are introduced to a vulgar power-hungry couple, the Macbeths of Balmer, Bonnie Juckman and her husband Ronnie Schloss. Miller combines their Mama and Papa Ubu ickiness with an unprecedented Joycean vision of 1990s Baltimore, digging deep into the trash à la John Waters. Let’s just call this book a verbal body slam!”
—Jeremy Sigler, author of My Vibe
Harry Miller is a native of Baltimore and a graduate of Wesleyan University. After a sojourn in Taiwan, he settled into academia and now teaches history at the University of South Alabama. He is the author of Southern Rain, a historical novel set in seventeenth-century China. Miller is married with three children. More at yellowcraneintherain.blog.