X-Ray Rider 2 E-Book

Wayne Kyle Spitzer

• Herausgeber: Wayne Kyle Spitzer
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Jonesing for a drive-in theater and a hotrod El Camino?It’s the dawn of the 1970s and everything is changing. The war in Vietnam is winding down. So is the Apollo Space Program. The tiny northwestern city of Spokane is about to host a World’s Fair. But the Watergate Hearings and the re-entry of Skylab and the eruption of Mount Saint Helens are coming…as are killer bees and Ronald Reagan.Enter ‘The Kid,’ a panic-prone, hyper-imaginative boy whose life changes drastically when his father brings home an astronaut-white El Camino. As the car’s deep-seated rumbling becomes a catalyst for the Kid’s curiosity, his ailing, over-protective mother finds herself fending off questions she doesn’t want to answer. But her attempt to redirect him on his birthday only arms him with the tool he needs to penetrate deeper—a pair of novelty X-Ray Specs—and as the Camino muscles them through a decade of economic and cultural turmoil, the Kid comes to believe he can see through metal, clothing, skin—to the center of the universe itself, where he imagines something monstrous growing, spreading, reaching across time and space to threaten his very world.Using the iconography of 20th century trash Americana—drive-in monster movies, cancelled TV shows, vintage comic books—Spitzer has written an unconventional memoir which recalls J.M. Coetzee’s Boyhood and Youth. More than a literal character, ‘The Kid’ is both the child and the adult. By eschewing the technique of traditional autobiography, Spitzer creates a spherical narrative in which the past lives on in an eternal present while retrospection penetrates the edges. X-Ray Rider is not so much a memoir as it is a retro prequel to a postmodern life—a cinematized “reboot” of what Stephen King calls the “fogged out landscape” of youth.Want to go for a ride?

Leseprobe

X-Ray Rider 2: Mileposts on the road to childhood's end

The X-Ray Rider Trilogy, Volume 2

Wayne Kyle Spitzer

Published by Hobb's End Books, 2017.

This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

X-RAY RIDER 2: MILEPOSTS ON THE ROAD TO CHILDHOOD'S END

First edition. November 25, 2017.

Copyright © 2017 Wayne Kyle Spitzer.

Written by Wayne Kyle Spitzer.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

I | Drag Race

II | The Boy with the X-Ray Eyes

III | The Dead Wasps

IV | Fire Not Flames

V | The Giant Spider Invasion

VI | Behind the Curtain

VII | Drive-in of the Dead

VIII | Dime-store Gazelle

To be continued in | X-RAY RIDER 2

I | Drag Race

HE HAS BEGUN TO NOTICE a pattern to all their riding about Spokane.

His parents revisit the same places over and over—his Uncle Shane’s painting business, for example, which is huge in comparison to his father’s, and which looks like an auto dealership with its neon signs and fleet of trucks, and his grandfather’s painting business, housed in an enormous brick building in Hillyard, a building with the words SPITZER INC. painted across the top, each letter the height of a man. They also visit a nightclub called the Pine Shed, where his uncle’s white Lincoln-Continental is often spotted, as well as a little house in Platter’s Ferry, where his mother’s first husband and young wife are said to live. Yet they do not visit these places so much as orbit them, slinking around their peripheries like spies, the Camino’s engine purring and growling.