Grave Digger Blues (Bare Bones Edition)

Crime fiction author and musician Jesse Sublett has been compared to Tom Waits, James Ellroy, Otis Rush, Michael Connelly and Denis Johnson. Not surprisingly, then, his new ebook, Grave Digger Blues, is a blast of surreal, post-apocalyptic noir, laced with blues poetry and actual songs and poems, the hardest of the hardboiled, the darkest of all noir fiction around today.

The novel is set during the last weeks of the world, boom times for two-legged and four-legged predators alike. Dual protagonists drive the narrative--The Blues Cat, an itinerant, doomed jazz musician, and Hank Zzybnx, a private detective haunted by the benevolent ghost of Marilyn Monroe, fragmented memories of the war in Murderstan, and a grifter mother who hated him before he was born.

It's a dangerous and strange world, but shot through with bizarre beauty and dreamlike weirdness. Grizzly bears and alligators have invaded the cities, walking catfish prowl the exurbs.

The best bar in town is the Morgue, so-named because its previous incarnation was the cold storage of the dead; now its industrial sized refrigerator serves an even more noble purpose: sweet relief for the last survivors of the rotting Republic.

After the Republican coup, when the wacked out right-wingers blew up the White House, the federal government was replaced by a corporate board of directors, but some of the plotters have fallen on hard times. Dick Cheney is a drag queen... Newt Gingrich is a security guard at Wal-Mart who moonlights with a circus strangling puppies, but the big attraction at the sideshow is a Reagan-faced monkey who quotes lines from Reagan's most famous speeches. Thus the chapter titled "Morning in America."

Note: This is the Bare Bones Edition of this book. Other editions of this book were published in November 2012. One edition includes over 100 photos, drawings and original music. The Blues Deluxe Edition for the iPad includes these illustrations plus over an hour of audio, including audio versions of selected chapters, plus demo versions of the original songs in this eBook.