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The Warhol Gang

The Warhol Gang

"Wow. No one has written a book this brainy, heartfelt, and absurd in a while. The Warhol Gang is so, so hilarious. The whole idea is insane, and the comic plot is laced with brilliant moment to moment, sentence- by-sentence wit and wisdom that just wows me completely. The dialogue is as whip-smart genius as Don DeLillo at his funniest, the observations remind me of Douglas Coupland at his most astute, and the absurd story, of course, is totally Darbyshire's own. He has plenty of fun with his premise that society is trapped in the hijacked commercial flight with a full-blown case of consumerist Stockholm Syndrome."
--Lee Henderson, author of The Man Game





Trotsky works for a neuromarketing company that scans his brain to test new products. Only his name isn't really Trotsky - that's a code name he's forced to use at work. And the products aren't real - they're just hologram prototypes. Unable to be himself and trapped in an increasingly unreal world that leaves him haunted with hallucinations, Trotsky goes to accident scenes at night in search of something genuine. Instead, he finds Holiday, a wannabe actress who fakes accidents for insurance settlements but who dreams of stardom. She leads him into an underground society of anti-corporate activists who live in a forgotten space in the mall. But when an encounter with a cop who has secrets of his own turns deadly, they're discovered by the media, which dubs them the Warhol Gang. At first Holiday and Trotsky embrace their notoriety and fame, but they're forced to confront their own desires and needs - and differences - when the Warhol Gang takes on a life of its own and the body count rises.

The Warhol Gang is an absurdist tale for an age of absurdism, a black comedy for anyone who's ever been trapped in an endless mall or fantasized about killing everyone in the office. It's Fight Club for the YouTube generation.
 




  • HarperCollins, Canada, Spring 2010



 
"...a violent, darkly comic satire of our media-saturated society... its unmistakably contemporary touches make Palahniuk's book feel dated... Darbyshire has a gift for imagining the absurd."
-The Globe and Mail
 
"The short snappy chapters move the story at just the right pace for the YouTube-conditioned reader, making this pop culture treasure trove a fast-paced, even addictive read."
-Winnipeg Free Press
 
"The Warhol Gang is a nightmare that will linger for days after you finish reading."
-Telegraph-Journal
 

"To the ranks of such transgressive, mind-screw masterpieces as George Bataille’s The Story of An Eye, the fiction of Kathy Acker and the early novels of Chuck Pahlaniuk, one must now add The Warhol Gang... one of the finest, and most important, Canadian novels in recent memory."
-Edmonton Journal

"...utterly compelling and readable..."
-Montreal Gazette

 

 

 

 
 
 

 



Peter Darbyshire
Peter Darbyshire's first novel, Please, won the ReLit Award for best alternative novel of the year and the Ontario Arts Council’s K.M. Hunter Award for best new book. Amazon.ca also included Please in its Canadian Essentials list. Darbyshire has lived in Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver. He is the books editor for the Vancouver Province.

click here to visit Peter Darbyshire's website




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