Elvissey: A Novel

Jack Womack

dek, 2007 · Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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A young Elvis Presley is kidnapped into the future to be the new messiah in this “jarringly potent” novel from the author of Ambient (William Gibson).
 
Winner of the Philip K. Dick Award
 
At once a biting satire and a taut sci-fi thriller, Elvissey is the story of Isabel and John, a troubled couple who are sent through a “window” from the year 2033 to a strangely altered 1954. They are on a desperate mission to kidnap a young Elvis Presley and bring him back to the present day to serve the powerful conglomerate Dryco as a ready-made cult leader. But when Elvis proves to be a reluctant messiah, things do not work out quite as planned.
 
With his distinctive prose, Womack has combined “serious sociological extrapolation, high and low comedy, pulp adventure, pop iconography” and more in this highly original novel (Omni).
 
“Nazi flying saucers over an alternate 1950s Memphis, your basic cross-time godhead abduction of Elvis Presley, and what must surely be one of the flat-out weirdest Fisher King inversions yet perpetrated in American literature. Achingly sad, downright alarmingly funny, and just about as serious as any of us can presently afford to be.” —William Gibson, author of Neuromancer
 
“Jack Womack is another of the heirs of cyberpunk, one of science fiction’s most interesting new writers” —Los Angeles Times
 
“Womack’s book is different in tone and content from anything you may have read.” —Financial Times
 
“Womack astounds and entertains. . . . Though the plot suggests the ridiculous, this is, in fact, a deep, often theological, reflection on love, betrayal and commercially inspired nihilism.” —Publishers Weekly

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Jack Womack is the author of Ambient, Terraplane, Heathern, Elvissey, Random Acts of Senseless Violence, Let’s Put the Future Behind Us, and Going, Going, Gone. Womack’s short stories, have appeared in anthologies edited by Kathryn Cramer (Walls of Fear, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind”), Ellen Datlow (A Whisper of Blood, “Lifeblood”) The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, and Little Deaths, “That Old School Tie,”), and Don Keller, Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman (The Horns of Elfland, “Audience”); as well as in Omni (“A Kiss, a Wink, a Grassy Knoll.”). He has published articles or reviews in Spin, the Washington Post Book World, Artbyte, Science Fiction Eye, Fantasy and Science Fiction, New York Review of Science Fiction, and Suddeutche Zeitung (Munich), and was a contributor to Amok: Fifth Dispatch. He is a cowinner of the Philip K. Dick Award, and has taught writing at the Clarion West workshop, in Seattle. He lives in New York City.