A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
Featured on recommended reading lists by the New York Times • New York Post • Library Journal • Thrillist • Locus • USA TODAY
Blending the piercing humor of Alexandra Kleeman and the jagged satire of Black Mirror, an audacious, eerily prescient debut novel that chronicles the rise and fall of a massive high-rise housing complex, and the lives it affected before - and after - its demise.
Standing nearly five hundred stories tall, Los Verticalés once bustled with life and excitement. Now this marvel of modern architecture and nontraditional urban planning has collapsed into a pile of rubble known as the Heap. In exchange for digging gear, a rehabilitated bicycle, and a small living stipend, a vast community of Dig Hands removes debris, trash, and bodies from the building's mountainous remains, which span twenty acres of unincorporated desert land.
Orville Anders burrows into the bowels of the Heap to find his brother Bernard, the beloved radio DJ of Los Verticalés, who is alive and miraculously broadcasting somewhere under the massive rubble. For months, Orville has lived in a sea of campers that surrounds the Heap, working tirelessly to free Bernard the only known survivor of the imploded city whom he speaks to every evening, calling into his radio show.
The brothers' conversations are a ratings bonanza, and the station's parent company, Sundial Media, wants to boost its profits by having Orville slyly drop brand names into his nightly talks with Bernard. When Orville refuses, his access to Bernard is suddenly cut off, but strangely, he continues to hear his own voice over the airwaves, casually shilling products as “he” converses with Bernard.
What follows is an imaginative and darkly hilarious story of conspiracy, revenge, and the strange life and death of Los Verticalés that both captures the wonderful weirdness of community and the bonds that tie us together.
About the Author
Sean Adams is a graduate of Bennington College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His fiction has appeared in Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Normal School, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Arkansas International, and elsewhere. He lives in Des Moines, Iowa with his wife, Emma, and their various pets.
Industry Reviews
"The first great science fiction novel of 2020. "
NPR
“As intellectually playful as the best of Thomas Pynchon and as sardonically warm as the best of Kurt Vonnegut. . . A masterful and humane gem of a novel.”
Shaun Hamill author of A Cosmology of Monsters
"Cutting satire . . . . A compelling narrative with unexpected twists and darkly comic turns."
New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice
"Like Snowpiercer's train, a George Saunders amusement park, or the fractured cityscape from a Donald Barthelme story, The Heap's Los Verticales is a sardonic monument to our decadent culture teetering on the brink of collapse. A wry, inventive, and highly original debut."
Chandler Klang Smith author of The Sky Is Yours
"Somehow both timely and timeless, The Heap explores with heart what it means to live in the wake of strange new kinds of catastrophe."
Seth Fried author of The Municipalists
"Darkly funny and dystopian."
New York Post
"A deeply weird but poignant novel about the extended family we discover amongst the rubble and ruin of a rich man's folly."
Locus
