Böcker av Bill Zaferos

Bill Zaferos wrote his first novel, the absurdist, rollicking Poison Pen, during a manic high. Now Zaferos is back with Serenity Heights, which he wrote in his well-medicated "right mind." Zaferos has lost none of the dark humor and weird plot twists that made critics call Poison Pen, "funny, outrageously so." Serenity Heights is the saga of a once-popular but now burned-out shock jock, "Rockin'" Donnie Derringer, as he settles into career purgatory working the overnight shift at a tiny radio station in Deerhead, Minnesota. Donnie sustains his boring small-town life with pot, alcohol and peanut butter, but when he makes a drunken late night suicide call to his sometime girlfriend Liz, he lands in Deerhead's loon hatch, Serenity Heights. Meanwhile, the chameleon game show host Jerry Most returns from Poison Pen and wants Donnie to appear on his new show, "Losers on Parade." Donnie figures an appearance on Most's show will rejuvenate his moribund career, only to have disaster fall upon him. Serenity Heights is a wild tale of what happens when you take the short in the quest to regain fame.

Poison Pen is the absurdist tale of redemption about a depressed game show host known for his cruel on-air insults and crude behavior. The story, as told by a misanthropic poison-pen-letter writer, offers an off-beat look at American culture while exploring themes of life, death, and the deeper meaning of 1960's television shows like The Beverly Hillbillies.Jerry Most is the acidic MC of Die Trying, a game show in which players perform death-defying acts for fabulous cash and prizes. But Jerry has had enough of the show and his lavish lifestyle. As he seeks inner meaning during a cross-country sojourn that lands him in Hammertown, a miserable northern Wisconsin burg, Jerry encounters a cast of characters that includes the dour protagonist, a beer-drinking, cheese stick-eating television rerun junkie, as well as Billie the Kangaroo, a troop of intoxicated baboons, and Pinky Lee, the muse and the bane of every man she encounters.Poison Pen is an unforgettable comic masterpiece in the tradition of A Confederacy of Dunces that Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Thomas Peele called a "tour de force."