Scream Queens of the Dead Sea: Sex! Heavy Metal! Linguistics! — Gilad Elbom

When a young graduate of the Israeli army decides to moonlight as an assistant nurse at a mental hospital in Jerusalem, the job seems like a nice break from everyday life in the Promised Land. What could be easier than exercising power over a small group of heavily medicated zombies? But as the human inventory inside the insane asylum begins to mirror the psychotic norms of the outside world, the inexperienced ex-soldier finds himself trapped in a hilarious yet terrifying freak show, surrounded by a motley crew of mad patients gone madder: a religious poet who writes obsessive love sonnets to a Hollywood porn queen, an exhausted narcoleptic who refuses to go to sleep without proper pay, a living dead girl who claims she was raped by the Dharma Bums, a charming racist who wears only purple, an Arab who thinks that Robinson Crusoe was a Jew, and a criminally insane murderer who doesn't believe in anything, not even in nihilism.

Scream Queens of the Dead Sea is a fast and furious first novel saturated with ruminations on sexual aberration, heavy metal, structural linguistics, horror movies, and satanic poetry -- the good things in life.