Gone Tomorrow (High Risk Books)

A coolly passionate, fiercely immediate chronicle of a death foretold before the full onslaught of AIDS, Gone Tomorrow is a dangerous and unsettling work of fiction. A brilliantly evocative first-person narrative of decadence by a jaded, disfigured young actor, this novel will inspire admiration for the valiance of its achievement, and provoke controversy for the unflinching honesty of its sensibility. It is 1984, amidst the rot and corruption of Colombia, where a serial killer is on the loose. Here, under the aegis of an at once seductive and monstrous film director ("dark, sardonic, and secretive"), an international troupe of actors and technical crew has convened to make a film of vast, if vague, ambition. With preternatural incisiveness and lyric intensity, the narrator dissects their obsessional, implosive relationships - fired by narcissism, sex, alcohol, and drugs - against an ominous backdrop of cultural dissolution, social anarchy, and political violence. By the author of the widely acclaimed Horse Crazy, Gone Tomorrow is a brave, apocalyptic, elegant novel about the final gasps and convulsions of hedonism in the 1980s.