| A sham pastor hires a cocaine-sniffing centaur to act as mascot for an Evangelical mega-churchs arena football team, Paul Revere flashes across a revolutionary sky on the back of a sunbird, an ammo-less infantry drummer and a bleeding medic are beat back to a Best Western parking lot in the Battle of Sacramentosuch are the situations contained in Ryan RidgesHunters& Gamblers. Winners of the negative lottery, these characters have learned to love to lose everything until theres nothing left to lose. And the end is desperate, black, drenched in whiskey, but punctuated by poignancy and revelry and revelation. The tales in this lurid, edgy debut illuminate blackness with even blacker humor and a sense of outlandish beauty. |
