The Louisiana Republic

Ten years after the Dark, a cataclysmic event that caused the internet to fail and the whole world to fall into tribalism and chaos, Alexandra, a tall blonde “with cheekbones as sharp as a razor blade,” walks into the Manhattan office of the nameless PI and horny bookworm who narrates Jakubowski’s derivative dystopia (after The Piper’s Dance) and thinks of himself as akin to “a character in a play by Samuel Beckett on loan from a Raymond Chandler yarn.” Alexandra wants him to track down her sister, Cherise, a sex queen in the pre-Dark age. Cherise may be in New Orleans, along with the narrator’s former girlfriend, with whom he lost touch at the time of the Dark. As Manhattan burns, it’s time for a trip down the Mississippi for Mardi Gras in the dangerous walled enclave of the Big Easy. This wild mélange, with its episodic action (including a public wrestling match in which an Amazonian hit woman sodomizes the narrator), devolves into a graphic erotic phantasmagoria. It works best as a tribute to Escape from New York and a host of other similarly themed movies and books. (Mar.)