Deja Vu and the Phone Sex Queen

By Michael McIrvin

Zeke Reilly has visions he fears will kill him. Ironically, he instead commits an inexplicable murder after failing to understand a cryptic message "from the beyond." His flight from the law separates him from the woman he secretly loves and becomes an existential quest to understand what his mother-in-law calls "his gift" of insight into the future.

When Zeke goes into hiding for his crime, he meets Cindy-her nom-de-phone-sex Cindy Sweet Stuff-their love affair a brief respite as his life careens toward an uncertain end.

In a desperate attempt to escape what he believes to be his fate, Zeke flees to Mexico where he meets shamans of various levels of authenticity and the members of a native revivalist cult at war with a drug lord. Cindy goes to great links to locate him, but Zeke is pursued by bounty hunters and is always just beyond her reach.

Zeke's intuition tells him the reason for his visions will be revealed in the land of the Aztec, Maya, and Toltec-and that he has been racing toward his destiny all along. But will his fate, if he survives long enough, include reuniting with Cindy and a chance to live without the burden of second sight?

D j Vu and the Phone Sex Queen is the speculative philosophical story of a man's search for meaning in an absurd world, where even tragic experience is commercialized, traditional cultures are subsumed by mass culture, and violence is a fact of daily life.

Readers of Don DeLillo's cultural commentary and Cormac McCarthy's myth-tinged explorations of random and casual violence as central to the human experience will appreciate D j Vu and the Phone Sex Queen, a philosophical novel that blends literary speculation, noir tension, and cultural satire.

Quotations from Reviewers:
In spite of...the title, McIrvin's novel is rich with meaningful insights about the conflicts between ancient and modern, primitive and civilized cultures. Above all, McIrvin dramatizes the burden and the anguish of living in a modern civilization. (John Minton)

McIrvin's protagonist, a regular guy with not so regular psychic abilities named Zeke Reilly, finds himself on a fugitive journey through the southwest and Mexico, a mythic traverse into what Garcia Lorca once described as "the dark root of the scream." ... The language of the prose is knife-like, clean, and fresh, and the sense of irony rich. McIrvin's got what used to be called "voice" in college writing classes, and his is plenty big and plenty strong. (Douglas W. Reitinger)

The reader will be enriched, as I have been, by McIrvin's narrative; told beautifully, with the tension and grace necessary in all art. (Simon Perchik)

Zeke Reilly's picaresque adventures are like nothing else in recent fiction. McIrvin's witty absurdities shape a critique of American culture and society that is unforgettable for its wit and biting irony. Zeke himself is an amazing character, like someone escaped from a Dickens novel to America, where he has gone terribly wrong. The conclusion of the novel is a magnificent set-piece of transcendent insight and beatitude, a coda of unexpected beauty. An exceptional book by a highly individual writer. (Amazon review of first edition)

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1734197064
• ISBN13: 9781734197068
• Release Date: January 2020
• Publisher: Fearful Symmetry Publications
• Length: 212 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.5"