The Alarming Palsy of James Orr
Tom Lee
ISBN: 9781641290043
Published: January, 2019
Pricing
Hardcover $23.00
Description
A Kafkaesque and darkly humorous “suburban gothic” that tracks the unraveling of man’s body, mind, and life.
James Orr—husband, father, reliable employee and all-around model citizen—awakes one morning to find half his face paralyzed.
Waiting for the affliction to pass, he stops going to work and wanders h...
A Kafkaesque and darkly humorous “suburban gothic” that tracks the unraveling of man’s body, mind, and life.
James Orr—husband, father, reliable employee and all-around model citizen—awakes one morning to find half his face paralyzed.
Waiting for the affliction to pass, he stops going to work and wanders his idyllic estate, with its woodland, uniform streets and perfectly manicured lawns. But there are cracks in the veneer. And as his orderly existence begins to unravel, it appears that James himself may not be the man he thought he was.
A deeply unsettling story of creeping horror that consistently confounds expectations, The Alarming Palsy of James Orr introduces a writer of extraordinary and disturbing talents.
Media
“Tom Lee’s clipped, cold-blooded sentences form a thin mantle over the sinisterly simmering plot of this mesmerising first novel.”
—The Financial Times
“In this disquieting novel, Lee explores how briskly the pleasures that we take for granted can vanish . . . Lee's writing pulses with humor and an appreciation of the abject silliness of human beings . . . He writes with a needle, and with a short-story master's eye for structure.”
—Sunday Times
“A sober and unsettling voice . . . The real accomplishment of Tom Lee's novel is its haunting evocation of the insidiously dystopian climate of English suburbia.”
—The Times Literary Supplement
“A quietly brilliant novel that questions whether conformity is a form of illness.”
—Metro (UK)
“This book reads like an insidious suburban nightmare, pared down to its bare essentials. A highly controlled and expert commentary on the fickleness of our modern life.”
—Book Riot
“A ferociously entertaining fable of a man coming undone. Like Donald Antrim, Tom Lee constructs a world of clean open air where curious things happen, where people aren't always who they seem, and where the places we choose to live turn out to be much stranger than we thought. You'll finish The Alarming Palsy of James Orr in a day, and obsess over it for weeks.”
—Ian MacKenzie, author of Feast Days
“A slim shiver of dread and paranoia, Tom Lee's superb debut novel explores the darkness that exists millimetres beneath the seemingly normal, regular world. It is a read-in-one sitting fable of considerable power and skill.”
—Stuart Evers, author of Ten Stories About Smoking
“Astonishing and riveting . . . a perfectly calibrated absurdist novel that amuses and unnerves in equal measure.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review on The Alarming Palsy of James Orr
“A fresh take on Kafka, highlighting the potential for terrifying change that may lurk in our DNA. Lee explores themes of illness and the almost dystopian alienation that emerges between sufferers and the well, and does so with artfulness and delicious doses of body horror and contemporary British social satire.”