ISBN 0-14-009330-3 (US pbk)

"...a group of minor league revolutionaries gets hold of some fissionable material and decides to blow up Manhattan as a grand terrorist act. Most of the book is devoted to the backgrounds of these men, losers all, and what happens to twist them into such a shape that destroying a city makes sense. This is where Bell soars". --Richard Kadrey (in Covert Culture Sourcebook , 1993).

"Its hero is the fanatically individualistic Clarence Larkin, who has located a profound solitude in the midst of New York City's millions. Larkin lives by photographing deformities for textbooks; he survives his daily perception of the rotting beast the world has become -- the city as a stinking beached whale -- by sliding into mystical visions. In time, Clarence rescues a child who's escaped from a diabolist father, a child with a pentagram carved by his own father into his flesh. Clarence finds in the mute child a doorway back to his own humanity. Bell's prose is immaculate, studded with dark gems, pared back but intense, and utterly accurate. His characterizations of Satanists, terrorists and gutter drunks ring terrifyingly true. His calm evocation of such phenomena as devil worship and spontaneous human combustion have a deft, understated power that for my money makes them far more believable than anything found in a Stephen King novel. Here is a writer who plumbs the depths of the human condition with a vibrant, piercing light. Wierdly pleasurable to read: I commend this book and this writer to anyone who believes that literature is also music." --John Shirley (in Science Fiction Eye , Volume 1, Number 3, March 1988).