The smoke clears, occasionally, to reveal celestial impossibilities: two moons, a giant swollen sun. Buildings burn, then repair themselves, then burn again. The paper arrives every morning bearing arbitrary dates: 1837, 1984, 2022. Gangsters roam the streets hidden inside menacing holograms of dragons and griffins and giant praying mantises. Riots and fires have cut the population down to a thousand. Phones and TVs are out electricity is spotty money is obsolete. The book is set in Bellona, a middle-American city struggling in the aftermath of an unspecified cataclysm. It doesn’t just document our craziness, it documents our craziness crazily: 800 epic pages of gorgeous, profound, clumsy, rambling, violent, randy, visionary, goofy, postapocalyptic sci-fi prose poetry. Delany’s Dhalgren is-like Moby-Dick, Naked Lunch, or “Chocolate Rain” -an essential monument both to, and of, American craziness.
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