A portion of this book appeared, in much different form, in RE:AL , Spring/Fall 1988.
"Dave, paroled after six months' hard time for tax evasion, has just landed the world's greatest job -- no mean feat for a man whose distaste for work put him in prison in the first place. A rich old lady has left her fortune to her twenty-three cats. As their caretaker, Dave is to receive a salary, expenses, and the use of her luxury beach house.
"Almost immediately things start to go wrong. The old woman's money is the focus of a power struggle between a cast of bizarre characters: Mary Nixon, the beautiful adventuress; Bryant C.Whitney, pastor of the local UFO church; Mrs.Cook, Dave's fundamentalist parole officer; Barbara and Charles, deaf and blind pirate-treasure hunters; and last, but not least, the enigmatic Terrell, philosopher, political theorist, and escaped murderer, who has decided to make Dave's home his own.
"Allied against them are Dave's new friends, the collection of skateboarders living in the abandoned concrete mansion just down the beach. These are society's newest outlaws, and from them Dave will learn the meaning of true freedom in an unfree world". [jacket blurb, US hbk, 1990]
"The book is actually about a welfare state -- it's about what we do when we have a guaranteed income, and we have all the leisure time we want. What do we do with ourselves? Suppose we're not writers or musicians. We're just ordinary Joes. What's an ordinary Joe gonna do when the robots are making a living for him?" --Lewis Shiner (in an interview with Howard Waldrop in Science Fiction Eye , Volume 1, Number 5, July 1989).
"A clear-eyed journey through a brilliantly observed parcel of the new American weirdness. Funny, moving, and admirably human, Slam reveals Shiner as a writer with the essential ability to locate and identify the contemporary wilderness adrift in the shopping malls and skateparks". --William Gibson.
"Intriguing cyberpunk mainstream non-genre novel". --Bruce Sterling.
"Shiner is a brilliant writer. More people should discover this guy's work. Slam kept me turning the pages... more, more". --Henry W.Targowski (in Mark/Space , 1995).
Highly recommended.
