BookView Review

Memphis’ latest novel is a postmodern saga about grief, rebellion, and the redemptive chaos of love. After his wife Maria is murdered on stage by a punk legend, painter-turned-pariah Littlethumb Brooks disappears into the Canadian wilderness.Years later, he resurfaces, not as an artist, but as the mastermind behind the Electric Medicine Men, a rogue group of poetic vigilantes. When a mission to intercept ivory reveals trafficked children and a mysterious jack-in-the-box-like device, the team is pulled into a far stranger conspiracy.

Littlethumb is a man undone: brilliant, broken, funny, dangerous. His surrogate family of misfits includes a hypnotist, a butcher, a Portuguese firebrand, and a man who may be descended from Christ. Together, they fight evil with style and conviction. The narrative veers joyfully, absurdly, and sometimes devastatingly between high-octane heists and painfully intimate moments of personal reckoning. Memphis’s writing is crisp and self-aware, breaking the fourth wall with deadpan asides and cosmic shrugs. And it works. Because beneath all the banter and brawls is a raw and beating heart. A man trying to survive the weight of love, of memory, of not knowing how to move forward. 

This is a story about what it means to survive loss without letting it define you. About turning pain into resistance. About absurdity as salvation. The structure is loose, the plot digresses, the jokes are often as devastating as the grief beneath them, but if you surrender to its rhythm, the story is unforgettable.

A chaotic, hilarious, heart-shredding story for readers who like their fiction unruly and true.

***