Louse

Debut novelist Grand evokes the frightening, impersonal futures of Kafka, Orwell and Philip K. Dick in this chilling account of a gambler who forfeits his memory in order to pay off his debts. When the reader first encounters him, Herman Q. Louse works as a domestic orderly in an ultramodern complex in the middle of the desert. His daily task is to administer near-lethal narcotic injections to Herbert Horatio ""Poppy"" Blackwell, the Howard Hughes-like Executive Controlling Partner of the Resort Town of G. A fabulously wealthy aviator and movie producer wasted now by age and drugs, Blackwell has created the hermetically self-sufficient Resort of G as the apotheosis of his megalomania and as an assurance of entering into Paradise. Staffed with numberless drugged drones who must study their ""social contracts"" to know what is and is not appropriate behavior, G promises the future trustee the chance to move up in the system by moving down ""and in the process of moving down, he will move up."" Louse, in many ways a model worker (he hunts vermin with alacrity and obediently injects himself in the palm when he feels the need to sleep), is troubled by the introduction of subversive forces into G's humming efficiency, forces insinuated by Poppy himself, which call Louse's very identity into question. Grand methodically and convincingly constructs Louse's antiseptic, delusionary environment with a control, dark humor and vertiginous imagination that are remarkable in a first novel. (Nov.)