The Heap

October 21, 2019
Adams’s debut, set on a disaster site in a strange alternate present, is an incandescent, melancholy satire. Orville Anders toils daily on the site of the collapsed Los Verticalés—a massive skyscraper. Every evening, he calls his brother, Bernard, a resident of the former tower who is somehow still broadcasting the radio show he hosts from somewhere in the rubble. Meanwhile, the bureaucratic chairperson of the Committee for Better Life in CamperTown stymies Orville’s friend Lydia’s schemes to oversee the upcoming visit of Peter Thisbee, the eccentric entrepreneur behind Los Verticalés, and share her views. After Orville rejects the radio station’s proposal that he begin mentioning brand names during the brothers’ conversations and they remove the phones, the calls continue regardless—in his own voice with painfully obvious product placement. As Orville investigates who is impersonating him, he stumbles into a violent, absurd conspiracy while Lydia abruptly gets her wish only to be hindered by Thisbee’s handlers. Excerpts from an oral history of the prior residents’ surreal life inside the tower provide a whimsically dystopian background to the main madcap plot. Fans of Borges and other inventive but piercing stories will revel in this offbeat novel. Agent: Kent Wolf, the Friedrich Agency.

November 8, 2019

DEBUT Los Verticales once stood five hundred stories tall, so broad from top to bottom that its residents comprised two groups, those who could still see natural light through their apartment windows, and the rest who had to rely on images on UV screens, guaranteed to "re-create 92 percent of the window experience." When the building collapsed, its remains covered 20 acres of ground. Volunteers are digging it out now, searching for anything usable in the rubble. Orville's brother Bernard, a radio journalist, was inside when the building collapsed. He's still broadcasting. The show is a national hit. Orville calls in every night and talks with him. When he's approached by the radio station's parent company and asked to insert product brand names into conversation with his brother but refuses, Orville is shut off from any further communication with Bernard. Still, every night he hears his own voice talking to Bernard, promoting the same products he'd refused to pitch. Things get steadily more menacing. Interspersed throughout are chapters detailing the skewed environment in which the complex dwellers lived, with the world outside not looking much better. VERDICT Adams's debut is an effective, jolting dystopic novel that should appeal widely. [See Prepub Alert, 10/22/19.]--David Keymer, Cleveland

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2019
In a social experiment gone tragically wrong, the 500-story nontraditional housing structure known as Los Vertical�s rose in an unnamed desert, thrived, rearranged the time of day for its inhabitants, produced a sprawling yet cramped, self-sufficient environment, and destructively fell to earth. The call to clear up the Heap, as it was then renamed, was put out by the building's enigmatic creator, and a global effort rose in earnest due to the building's very own radio personality, Bernard Anders, who is still broadcasting live from deep within the rubble. Among the motley group of recovery workers is Bernard's brother, Orville, shoveling through the immense ruins to reunite with his trapped sibling. The cluttered yet routine-oriented world first novelist Adams describes surrounding the Heap recalls elaborate dystopian scenes found in Terry Gilliam films, while life in Los Vertical�s before its collapse is purportedly drawn from the sporadic records of the nostalgia-addled Displaced Travelers, who were not present for the fall. The structure's past and the Heap's story of brotherly connection present irresistibly clever commentary steeped in wit and secrets.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)