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by Omar Hussain
Omar Hussain's dazzling debut, A Thousand Natural Shocks, is a mesmerizing meditation on trauma, memory, and identity wrapped in a high-octane thriller.
Dash, a reporter in Monterey, California, is desperate to outrun his past. During the day, he investigates the reemergence of a long-dormant serial killer. At night, he has become entangled with a criminal cult that promises a pill to erase his traumatic memory.
But as Dash begins to lose his memories—and his sense of self—he discovers a dark secret about the cult, one that would horrify its members. And soon he finds himself in a race against time to evade the cult, unveil the killer, and reconcile his past before his own memories fade away ...
"Hussain effectively channels the surreal paranoia of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly and the dark absurdity of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice to craft a wholly original serial killer tale. It's an auspicious first outing." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Omar Hussain's A Thousand Natural Shocks is the most fun reading experience I've had in years. It's a Tarantino movie in book form. And that doesn't mean it skimps on the 'book' part of the equation: it's smart, lyrical, penetrating, and literary as hell. But it also comes with eight thousand volts of sizzle. You'll want to read this before everyone else starts talking about it. Just prepare to have your hair singed." —Darin Strauss, internationally bestselling author of Half a Life
"An engrossing Northern California noir that balances its pulp instincts with haunting atmospherics and a patiently ticking mystery." —Stephen Markley, author of Ohio and The Deluge
This information about A Thousand Natural Shocks was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Omar Hussain is a writer from the San Francisco Bay Area currently living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He holds an MFA in creative writing from NYU. A Thousand Natural Shocks is his first novel.
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