Big Machine

You made a promise in Cedar Rapids in 2002.

Time to honor it.

Ricky Rice is a middle-aged, middling hustler with a lingering junk habit, a bum knee, and a haunted mind. The sole survivor of a suicide cult, he spends his days scraping by as a porter at a bus depot in Utica, New York, until one day a letter arrives, reminding him of a vow he once made and summoning him to Vermont’s remote Northeast Kingdom to fulfill it.

There, Ricky is inducted into a band of paranormal investigators comprised of former addicts and petty criminals, all of whom had at some point in their wasted lives heard the Voice: a murmur on the wind, a disembodied shout, a whisper in an empty room that may or may not have been from God. Their mission is to find the Voice – and figure out what it wants.

Big Machine takes us from Ricky’s childhood in a beatific cult housed in a New York City tenement to his near-death in the basement of an Iowa house owned by a man named Murder to his final confrontation with an army of true believers – and with his own past.

Infused with the wonder of a disquieting dream and laced with Victor LaValle’s fiendish comic sensibility, Big Machine is a mind-rattling mystery about doubt, faith, and the monsters we carry within us.