V.I.R.U.S. agents Val Siouxx and Levis Coak are desperate to develop a narrative that will keep their clandestine organization in lock-step with the American zeitgeist. In 1964, the spooks track down hermetic newbie novelist Thomas Pynchon to his Mexico footlocker hideout to coerce him into writing a burn-book about Vito Paulekas, the Cold War-era F.B.I. asset-gone-rogue-turned-artist who has raised and radicalized a loyal troupe of dancing Freaks in his Hollywood, California basement studio. So, like, what gives, man? Will Pynchon accept the federal freelance gig? Will the paranoid pothead unearth the plot points connecting the Freak King to Tinseltown, Theosophy, and the Black Dahlia/Manson Family/Zodiac Killer psyops?
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420 pages
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Pbk: 979-8-218-94602-9
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eBk: 979-8-218-94735-4
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100% Organic Intelligence (O.I.)
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NO Trigger Warnings
Fiction // Satire
DESCRIPTION
In an age defined by synthetic realities and weaponized narratives, John Ledbetter’s debut novel Deadbeat Escapement arrives as a daring literary excavation.
The book details the larger-than-life, self-styled “King of the Freaks,” Vito Paulekas, the mad sculptor of Hollywood whose radical basement dance scene anchors a sprawling web linking the 1947 Black Dahlia murder, the Zodiac’s taunting letters, Cold War psychological operations, and the shadowy overlap of counterculture with state power. Structured in three phases of a mysterious commission report, the novel hurtles through buried Los Angeles waterways, dynamited film sets, and secret speakeasies with relentless momentum.
A parallel storyline tracks the obstacles of T-d, a novelist recruited into the clandestine CIA program V.I.R.U.S. and ordered to smear Paulekas by exploiting his communist ties and lifelong criminal endeavors. T-d's handlers, the absurd yet menacing agents Levis Coak and Val Siouxx, wield real institutional power, mixing bureaucratic menace with hedonism to trap T-d in a web of threats to his freedom and work.Ledbetter builds the story from municipal permits, obituaries, clippings, and declassified documents, then subjects them to radical formal invention. Dense, playful, erudite prose filled with wordplay, tonal shifts, and digressive myth-making braids fact and fiction so tightly that the boundary itself becomes part of the story.
There are hallucinatory sequence shifts, such as exploring 1888 Paris to eavesdrop on a freezing van Gogh and Gauguin as they debate art, murder, and beauty, while across the Channel the Whitechapel Murders swallow streets whole; the emergence of modern art just a hop, skip & a jump from the chaotic, system-changing violence that will define an era.
14-27
39-51
186-190
266-274
At once a love letter to Los Angeles’s lost weirdness and a forensic takedown of fabricated realities, Deadbeat Escapement is wildly funny, intellectually ferocious, and often alarming. Government assets go rogue, dance troupes become infiltration sites, and the line between authentic rebellion and engineered narrative dissolves. Complex, allusive, and propulsive, it marks John Ledbetter as a major new voice in American satirical fiction—one who maps the hall of mirrors by charging forward, no matter what breaks.
“This has the feel of a great (American) novel, representing our country before the collapse.”
-- Jacob Appelbaum, Computer Security Researcher & Hacktivist
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