The Visitors

C can’t pay her debts. Once a renowned textile artist, her husband has left her sole proprietor of a small crafts store in Lower Manhattan. He’s also left C with their empty apartment, a stack of medical bills, and a persistent hallucination in the form of a funny little man with a tall red hat and a taste for systems theory.

Threatened with the loss of home, livelihood and sanity, C seeks out some aid, if not charity. Her childhood friend V, now a wealthy financier, would happily assist, if only C’s pride and feelings of both attachment and desire would allow her to ask for help. Instead, C paces the city’s streets as protesters gather in a square downtown, her days punctuated by the developing news story of a terrorist threat to take down the national grid, plunging the United States―not to mention this novel―into darkness and chaos.

With C’s sense of economic, romantic, and artistic potential all thwarted, the boundaries between her strange visitor’s consciousness and C’s own begin to dissipate, until C returns, finally, to her abandoned art for a final, horrifying ‘project’ that will allow her to regain some control over her fate.

Darkly funny and uncannily percipient, The Visitors looks at our world darkly, presenting a Pynchonesque alternate timeline in which the Occupy protests didn’t sputter out; where terrorists can upload malware directly into your head; where gnomes talk like Don DeLillo. Is this science fiction? Maybe. But it feels altogether right and almost real...a witty but sobering message from both the recent past and our impossible future.