Book trailer for The Valeries by Forrest Muelrath

The Valeries
Forrest Muelrath
ExPat Press, 2024
expatpress.com

A grief counselor attempts to launder the hideous exploits between his son and a famous politician through the novel-writing process and in doing so becomes a different person, a body of words. A legalistic maneuver to ostensibly guard his family’s reputation via copyright becomes a solipsistic plunge into a lurid spectacle of family trauma, a narrative device to yield confession from a would-be savior’s crisis of faith. Verisimilitude cracks, reality stranger than fiction, and the news becomes a carousel of sliding doors, tabloid becomes marquee, and anyone could be anyone, even the least suspected a person of interest. A feat of formal and stylistic detournement, a forgery of ontological dimensions and licentious scandal fluent in Lacanian psychoanalysis, synthesizers and cinema, Forrest Muelrath’s debut novel The Valeries takes the dark, revealing heart of American conspiracy dripping to the seats of gubernatorial power and halls of elected high office. An internal monologue externalized as digital correspondence, intimate rumination and grandiose indictment, gallows comedy and psychic noir for an unprecedented political era. As the narrator’s motives unravel, the blackmail itself becomes a work of live art, a mirror to distort the grief counselor’s suppositions and wrap them in the decrepit national mood and spirit. Beyond entanglement lies dangerous hubris and innovation. Lose everything. Everything else is waiting.

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