Description
"Stories turn corners. They bump into you: You take them!" So New York writer Benjamin Kohlman has been told by one of many former bosses. Alone again and desperate, Kohlman has finally found his: Janice Stewart, recently acquitted of the grisly arson/murder of her father-in-law. Kohlman follows Janice to Las Vegas where she works as a keno runner. Anxious to start his book, Kohlman offers Janice, now known as Angel, a contract. The elusive, innocent Angel construes it as a marriage contract, and Kohlman's bizarre adventures begin. A whole troupe of remarkable denizens inhabit Kohlman's "hellish paradise." Mysteriously treated like a high-roller in the casinos, Kohlman is also beaten, stabbed, and shot. His wounds are salved by a doctor and his wife who offer a kinky interpretation of the Hippocratic oath. A black messianic boxer known as Challenger teaches Kohlman the meditative art of psychokinesis, and together they perform amazing feats. Angel, who introduces the resistant Kohlman as her husband, loves him with an unconditional devotion he has never known. As this sensual, darkly comical fantasia reaches its peak, the President of the United States arrives to tape a video with Comus, a Valkyrian special-effects artist who can make any public relations fantasy look real. But after all his trials, Kohlman may be redeemed through shedding his own blood and through his growing love for Angel. He feels "cut loose. Bound and unbound. Wild. More alive than he'd been since he'd been a child...at once exquisitely reckless—yet bound to some long-standing and deep-driven axis." As Angel says, "Las Vegas is America." Western Literature Series.

Reviews
“As its subtitle predicts, this novel is a love story. It is also a romance in the older, Hawthornian sense of the word: it is filled with the fantastic, the improbable, and the shocking. . . . Though it is not a comfortable or sanitary novel, it has power and visceral authenticity. David Kranes is a dealer in archetypal transformations. His style is intense and introspective. His action is fast paced and suspenseful. His metaphors are sometime audacious, always striking. His theme is affirmative. He assures us that the calm, as well as the rage, of the world will assert itself.” —Levi S. Peterson, Weber Studies

“This book will rattle your cage. It is fast, lively, unrestricted entertainment.” —The Overlay, 1990