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THE SILVERBERG BUSINESS by Robert Freeman Wexler

THE SILVERBERG BUSINESS

by Robert Freeman Wexler

Pub Date: Aug. 23rd, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-61873-201-9
Publisher: Small Beer Press

In 1888, a Jewish PI from Chicago who goes by the name Shannon is hired to find Nathan Silverberg, a missing developer behind the creation of a Texas colony for Romanian Jewish refugees.

Shannon quickly discovers that Silverberg was swindled out of his money and murdered, but tracking down the killers, including a gambler with white hair and red eyes named Stephens, proves an epic undertaking. With his special onyx ring, Stephens sends the detective off into a bizarro alternate world where people with skull heads and "tonguelets" flit around and play epic games of poker. Shannon, who gets hit in the head a lot, has difficulty enough separating dreams from reality, but he's hardly prepared for the scenarios that unfold in this dimension. They include his seduction by a scantily clad skullhead called “the saloon girl.” Ultimately, his success at poker will determine not only his own survival, but also that of people in the "actual" world faced with sandstorms "powerful enough to sink a civilization." As in real life, the book's setting of Indianola was twice destroyed by hurricanes in the late 1800s. Other aspects of the book are drawn from Texas history by Wexler, a relaxed surrealist who is less interested in big, scary effects than subtle underpinnings and intellectual concepts—"determinism in modern thought," for example. Ultimately, the Jewish component is underdeveloped and Wexler's "inside" narrative game can bog down for stretches. But any book with a guitar-playing sheriff, an ex-con named Slack-Face Jake, and a giant in a bowler hat is worth a spin.

A weird but oddly convincing creature feature.