The Squimbop Condition

David Leo Rice

From the Author of Drifter

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Disclaimer: By purchasing this product, you acknowledge that you’ve willingly exchanged your hard-earned cash for something that may or may not work as intended, look like the pictures, or permanently exist in this physical universe. Side effects may include excessive confidence, mild disappointment, dizziness, confusion, radical patriotism, or sudden questioning of your life choices. Reading about the side effects may cause additional side effects. Batteries are not included or needed, but could be fun to look for in places where they shouldn’t be. This item is not intended for ingestion, inhalation, insertion, summoning ancient spirits, or use as a flotation device. We are not responsible for any emotional, physical, spiritual, or interdimensional consequences that result from improper use, overuse, or use during a full moon. Keep out of reach, preferably on a high shelf, the eye pointing westward.

Results may vary. Author not included.

PUBLICATION DATE: September 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781948687706
PRICE: $30
PAGE: 342 / Hardcover
Size: 5.5x8.5

Distributor: Asterism

Cover art +
Illustration +
Lettering and Design: jr duennweller

Typeset +
Additional design elements: Mike Corrao

Advanced Praise for ‘The Squimbop Condition’

David Leo Rice writes fiction with a seething ferocity, brilliance, and arcane imagination; the Squimbop Condition is a surreal and profound leap into the timeless art of storytelling. David Leo Rice is a writer I greatly admire. – Brandon Hobson, finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, and author of The Devil is a Southpaw

Reading David Leo Rice’s The Squimbop Condition is like stumbling into the world of an unmade David Lynch movie, getting lost in the dream of it. Tracking the escapades of the notorious Brothers Squimbop, it plays like a roadshow presentation full of mysterious visions from a realm both alien and familiar. Like Richard Brautigan and Flann O’Brien and Samuel Beckett, Rice is a marauding magician, and he’s both deadly serious and deadly funny. The Squimbop Condition is a majestic and strange force of a book, a work of wild pleasures for our unsettled, damaged times. – William Boyle, author of Saint of the Narrows Street

I’ve always been a DLR super fan, and The Squimbop Condition is a new pinnacle. It has a joyful rhythm, a cadence that pervades the psyche until our concepts of self, other, relation, and identity tumble out topsy-turvy. I cherish the hours I spent with this book. – Charlene Elsby, author of The Devil Thinks I’m Pretty and Violent Faculties

Much like his titular characters, David Leo Rice is an agent of chaos, inciting literary anarchy with an aptitude rarely seen in today’s so-called experimental writing scene. The Squimbop Condition unleashes a barrage of questions so incisive it renders any and all answers moot; functioning simultaneously as a medical text, a historical document, and even a holy book. It is a diagnosis of our collective malaise. A prescient lesson plan outlining a new golden age of American fiction. – Joshua Chaplinsky, author of Letters to the Purple Satin Killer 

PRAISE FOR ‘Drifter’

One of the Southwest Reviews’10 Must-Read Books of 2021

“Drifter should secure Rice a place on the same list as… [Thomas] Ligotti and Brian Evenson…. The writing here is that weird, and that good.” –  Gabino Iglesias, The Southwest Review

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. — Kimberly King

A grotesque spectacle of unreality. — Matthew Baker

Somewhere between Bradbury and Ligotti, Rice folds centuries of Americana into a space unstuck from time. — B.R. Yeager

PRAISE FOR David Leo Rice

“What might happen if Edvard Munch decided to paint directly on the inside of his own skull rather than a canvas.” – Brian Evenson

“The ease, the command, the deadpan assurance of Rice’s language, and the angularity of his imagination can make even the unspeakable somehow charming.” – Matthew Specktor in the LA Review of Books

“Lash yourself to the mast of your ark as you set sail for the siren song of David Leo Rice’s imagination… The emerging cult novelist of today's moment, he’s the reigning surrealist sorcerer of tomorrow’s century.” - Steve Erickson, author of Zeroville and Shadowbahn

“The New House is magic. It's a book so infused with dreams that it seems to be dreaming us into being—you and me and the families that form us, the towns that try us, the shadows that want to wake us or take us away for good. I don't remember a book that captured dreaming so perfectly, or at least captured my dreams: the streets I repeatedly step down, the edges of town that scare the shit out of me, the sweetness that always seems to dissipate while I'm savouring it” – Derek McCormack

“[The Berlin Wall] is a startling declaration of artistic purpose, a capstone of Rice’s work hitherto, and a revolt against established genre.” – Theodore Sovinski, Full Stop Magazine