The Infernal

By Mark Doten

Book Overview

A fierce, searing response to the chaos of the war on terror--an utterly original and blackly comic debut

In the early years of the Iraq War, a severely burned boy appears on a remote rock formation in the Akkad Valley. A shadowy, powerful group within the U.S. government speculates: Who is he? Where did he come from? And, crucially, what does he know? In pursuit of that information, an interrogator is summoned from his prison cell, and a hideous and forgotten apparatus of torture, which extracts "perfect confessions," is retrieved from the vaults. Over the course of four days, a cavalcade of voices rises up from the Akkad boy, each one striving to tell his or her own story. Some of these voices are familiar: Osama bin Laden, L. Paul Bremer, Condoleezza Rice, Mark Zuckerberg. Others are less so. But each one has a role in the world shaped by the war on terror. Each wants to tell us: This is the world as it exists in our innermost selves. This is what has been and what might be. This is The Infernal.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1555977014
• ISBN13: 9781555977016
• Release Date: February 2015
• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 0.57 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.0"