Distortion — Stephen Beachy

During a year that resembles 1991, with war and its aftermath as the constant background noise, Reggie is bouncing around the country, hustling and trying to stave off personal catastrophe. With his own drug-addled sense of history merging with revelation, and his own destiny merging with something he begins to suspect is evil, the scope of the catastrophe seems increasingly cosmic in proportions. In a landscape of airplane disasters, arson fires, emergent viruses and the confounding stew of humanity in the backseats of Greyhound buses, his story intersects a variety of characters equally unmoored from the reference points and false hopes offered by a mutating social order. The barely communicable dreams of indie film directors, occultist producers, punk poets, aspiring actresses and refugees trapped in their own stories of impending doom reduce the quest for love to rubble, leaving only a conflicted yearning for apocalypse in its place. Distortion is a prophetic book peering beneath the surface of American life to discover how much will be risked for the sake of transformation.