Charley
is an athlete. He wants to grow up to be the fastest runner in the
world, like his father. He wants to be painted crossing the finishing
line, in his racing silks, with a medal around his neck. Charley lives
in a stable. He isn't a runner, he's a mount. He belongs to a Hoot:
The Hoots are alien invaders. Charley hasn't seen his mother for years,
and his father is hiding out in the mountains somewhere, with the
other Free Humans. The Hoots own the world, but the humans want it
back. Charley knows how to be a good mount, but now he's going to
have to learn how to be a human being.
The Mount is the new novel
by Carol Emshwiller, author of Carmen Dog and Ledoyt.
Chapter
One:
"We're not
against
you, we're for. In fact we're built for you and you for us -- we,
so our weak little legs will dangle on your chest and our tail down
the back. Exactly as you so often transport your own young when
they are weak and small. It's a joy. Just like a mother-walk."
Read on
Chapter
Two
The Mount
is available in Canada, too. Bookshops can order from Marginal Distributors,
who had this
to say about it.
T-shirts,
mugs, &c.
Praise for The Mount:
"The
Mount is so extraordinary
as to be unpraiseable by a mortal such as I. I had to keep putting
it down because it was so disturbing then picking it up because it
was so amazing. A postmodernist would call it The Eros of Hegemony,
but I'm no postmodernist. Nearly every sentence is simultaneously
hilarious, prophetic, and disturbing. This person needs to be really,
really famous."
-- Paul Ingram, Prairie Lights
Bookstore
We are all Mounts and so should
read this book like an instruction manual that could help save our
lives. That it is also a beautiful funny novel is the usual bonus
you get by reading Carol Emshwiller. She always writes them that way.
-- Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Years of Rice and Salt
I've been a fan of Carol Emshwiller's
since the wonderful Carmen Dog. The Mount is a terrific novel,
at once an adventure story and a meditation on the psychology of freedom
and slavery. It's literally haunting (days after finishing it, I still
think about all the terrible poetry of the Hoot/Sam relationship)
and hypnotic. I'm honored to have gotten an early look at it.
-- Glen David Gold, author of Carter Beats the Devil
This novel is like a tesseract,
I started it and thought, ah, I see what she's doing. But then the
dimensions unfolded and somehow it ended up being about so much more.
-- Maureen McHugh, author of Nekropolis
Carol Emshwiller's The Mount
is a wicked book. Like Harlan Ellison's darkest visions, Emshwiller
writes in a voice that reminds us of the golden season when speculative
fiction was daring and unsettling. Dystopian, weird, comedic as if
the Marquis de Sade had joined Monty Python, and ultimately scary,
The Mount takes us deep into another reality. Our world suddenly
seems wrought with terrible ironies and a severe kind of beauty. When
we are the mounts, who -- or what -- is riding us?
-- Luis Alberto Urrea, author of Six Kinds of Sky
See the original painting
(large image)
Carol Emshwiller previous
novels are Carmen
Dog, Ledoyt,
and Leaping
Man Hill.
