Better Than Heisenberg

Better than Heisenberg follows high risk behavior in Jake, Nevada, a gambling town high on a mountain which has all the noir virtues of any Western settlement funded by mining and gambling.  There you can look out your hotel window to watch nuclear bomb tests raise huge plumes of dust in the desert below while thousands of people run around Jake's neon streets on their way to what they want.  "Everything is Jake in Jake, " says Viva Jake, the town magazine.

Beneath the turbulent worship of Chance in Jake, is a romance in the old sense when young men stalked serpents with a sword. But in this epic of many men misunderstanding many women, the monster isn't a dragon. It is the lizard which rears up inside the male and eats through his brains until there is nothing left in his head to stop him from betting other people's lives on dice. 

The lives of all these reckless people are illustrated with colored graphics (drawn by Robert A. Nelson, a winking modern Leonardo), photos from the 50's, and red ink graffiti by the reading public of Portland, OR. Perhaps there is no other work of fiction out there which has so much graphic color where it belongs in the narrative as opposed to packed into a special section far away from its action.

As Alex Viner's favorite dead Apache said the instant before he jumped the Twig into the long home of the grave, "There is no truth, there are only stories." This story is new. And loaded with color.