Drifter: Stories by David Leo Rice
Rice’s fiction touches on the strange, phantasmagorical, and horrific, but juxtaposes those elements with headier explorations of narratives and the self; it’s like little else out there. —Vol. 1 Brooklyn
Like peering through a slit at some brilliant, brutal new world, DRIFTER is unnerving and audaciously intelligent, full of wild possibility, dark humor, and lurking doom. With all the visceral detail and haunting logic of a beautiful, disturbing dream, Rice stylishly explores the grim, the hidden, the unhinged.— Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light
A grotesque spectacle of unreality. — Matthew Baker, author of WHY VISIT AMERICA and HYBRID CREATURES
David Leo Rice’s Drifter is a wonderful, new form of entertainment devised for the growing ranks of the Poison-Ivy League educated precariat. Text-based stories — short enough to be enjoyed in those lulls between low-paying jobs — concerning people slightly worse off than oneself. A salutary break from the grinding spectacles of moving pictures and comics. As advised on page 109: you can read the text, then close your eyes and enjoy your own self-generated images in a style and texture of your choice. Highly recommended! — Ben Katchor, Guggenheim and MacArthur-winning author of Julius Knipl: Real Estate Photographer, The Cardboard Valise, and many other classic American comics
Somewhere Between Bradbury and Ligotti, Rice folds centuries of Americana into a space unstuck from time, where everything is an anachronism. Here, he explores the blurry divisions between adulthood and childhood, the seeming impossibility of atonement, the madness of certainty.— B.R. Yeager, Author of Negative Space
I’m trying to remember the last time a collection of stories so captured my attention by the strength of its voices and sense of presence in each of its living moments. Think Brian Evenson’s Fugue State, or Susan Steinberg’s early collections. There’s such life here, such clarity of vision. It’s exhilarating to watch a writer like Rice engage his ambitions so immediately and with a seemingly inexhaustible well of ideas. This is a magnificent book. — Grant Maierhofer, Author of Works and Peripatet
The horror in Drifter’s meticulous and exquisitely bleak stories does not impose itself from without, but is instead woven into the very inscrutable necessity to exist, so that even with the more abstract or extramundane tales there’s this same intimidating sense of compulsive human duty – out of nowhere and for nothing. The details, however familiar, are always in devious service to some shadowing alterity, some arcane yet immersive otherness, enacting a kind of doubling, a superpositioning of identity, that through its overdetermination makes David Leo Rice’s creations seem both eerily dense and unreal. Gloriously inventive, sober and freakish, this is a collection to relish. — Gary J. Shipley,author of Dreams of Amputation and Stratagem of the Corpse
Grotesque and tender, irreal and grounded, nostalgic, forward-looking, and of the moment, David Leo Rice's Drifter, as its title suggests, isn't easily sited. Imagine going to a video store ca. 1998 and renting tapes at random from the "Cult Movies" section, but every tape you pick makes you want to tell all of your friends, "You have to see this." You have to read Drifter. —Gabriel Blackwell, author of Babel and CORRECTION
Dylan sang, “Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is.” The stories of DaviD Leo Rice’s Drifter slip between reality and surrealism continuously, showing us how thin the fabric of reality really is. No matter which side you find yourself on, you can just make out the shapes on the other side. These stories stack up, brick by brick, creating a literary Tower of Babel, where language and image obscure, muddying the waters of perception. You catch glimpses of clarity as the current pulls you downstream. The stories, while complete in themselves, create a larger dialogue when combined. In Housesitter, a character’s fall down a flight of stairs is described, “And it wasn’t just the impact of the concrete bottom that broke her up...It was each individual stair, one after another after another. Relentless.” These stories hit you like those stairs, one after another after another, truly relentless until you hit the bottom. Looking up at those stairs you can see just how far you have fallen, just how far Rice has pushed you. These stories are packed with meaning, reality and unreality shoved inside “with no way out and no reason to leave.” Though you look around at unfamiliar surroundings, you’re not lost; you live in motion now. And it’s all in flux. You’re moved, constantly shuffled, until you get “a sense that standing still was no longer a good idea, if it ever had been.” Rice writes, “they made her feel like she was in both places at once and thus, sickeningly, in neither.” These stories exist in the in-between. Intangibility hangs like a veil, but whether a bride’s or a widow’s is hard to determine. — A.S. Coomer, Author of Birth of a Monster and Memorabilia
'Drifter: Stories' is a massive collection that contains a decade's worth of short fiction by visionary writer David Leo Rice, with work first published in 'The Fanzine', 'The Rumpus', 'Black Clock', 'DIAGRAM' and elsewhere.
Every comes with a chapbook containing David's story 'The Hate Room' designed by Matthew Revert
PUBLICATION DATE: JUNE 15, 2021
Press Coverage
Southwest Review [REVIEW]
15 Questions [INTERVIEW]
What the Book [PODCAST]
Ligeia [INTERVIEW]
Believer [INTERVIEW]
Skylight Books [PODCAST]
The Brooklyn Rail [INTERVIEW]
Drifter PLAYLIST on Largehearted Boy
GHOULISH with Max Booth III [PODCAST]
Selected Prose Reading Series // The Painless Euthanasia Roller Coaster [READING]
Wake Island Podcast [PODCAST]
Writing the Rapids [PODCAST]
'Drifter: Stories' contains
'The Brothers Squimbop' (First published in 'The Fanzine') 'Egon's Parents' (First published in 'The Last Magazine') 'The Meadows' (First published in 'The Collagist) 'Circus Sickness' (First published in 'Cosmonauts Avenue') 'Housesitter' (First published in 'Birkensnake') 'Living Boy' (First published in 'Black Clock') 'Out on the Coast' (First published in 'The Rumpus') 'In the Cabin up on Stilts' (First published in 'Black Clock') 'The Hate Room' (First published in 'New Haven Review') 'Gmunden' (First published in 'The Collagist') 'The Painless Euthanasia Roller Coaster' (First published in 'Catapult') 'The Brothers Squimbop in Europe' (First published in ‘The Rupture’) 'ULTRA MAX' 'Jell-O' (First published in 'DIAGRAM') 'Sandman Crescent' (First published in 'The Collagist') 'The Right Town' (First published in ‘Collected Voices in the Expanded Field’)
About the Author
The author, center, in 1990
David Leo Rice is a writer and animator from Northampton, MA, currently living in NYC. He’s the author of the novels A Room in Dodge City, A Room in Dodge City Vol. 2, ANGEL HOUSE, and The New House, coming in 2022. This is his debut story collection. He’s online at: www.raviddice.com
David currently teaches creative writing at The New School.
ISBN: 9781948687386 (ebook)
ISBN: 9781948687294 (summer paperback)
ISBN: 9781948687300 (winter paperback)