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The Heap

A Novel

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

"As intellectually playful as the best of Thomas Pynchon and as sardonically warm as the best of Kurt Vonnegut, The Heap is both a hilarious send-up of life under late capitalism and a moving exploration of the peculiar loneliness of the early 21st century. A masterful and humane gem of a novel." —Shaun Hamill, author of A Cosmology of Monsters

Blending the piercing humor of Alexandra Kleeman and the jagged satire of Black Mirror, an audacious, eerily prescient debut novel that chronicles the rise and fall of a massive high-rise housing complex, and the lives it affected before - and after - its demise.

Standing nearly five hundred stories tall, Los Verticalés once bustled with life and excitement. Now this marvel of modern architecture and nontraditional urban planning has collapsed into a pile of rubble known as the Heap. In exchange for digging gear, a rehabilitated bicycle, and a small living stipend, a vast community of Dig Hands removes debris, trash, and bodies from the building's mountainous remains, which span twenty acres of unincorporated desert land.

Orville Anders burrows into the bowels of the Heap to find his brother Bernard, the beloved radio DJ of Los Verticalés, who is alive and miraculously broadcasting somewhere under the massive rubble. For months, Orville has lived in a sea of campers that surrounds the Heap, working tirelessly to free Bernard—the only known survivor of the imploded city—whom he speaks to every evening, calling into his radio show.

The brothers' conversations are a ratings bonanza, and the station's parent company, Sundial Media, wants to boost its profits by having Orville slyly drop brand names into his nightly talks with Bernard. When Orville refuses, his access to Bernard is suddenly cut off, but strangely, he continues to hear his own voice over the airwaves, casually shilling products as "he" converses with Bernard.

What follows is an imaginative and darkly hilarious story of conspiracy, revenge, and the strange life and death of Los Verticalés that both captures the wonderful weirdness of community and the bonds that tie us together.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      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.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Four excellent narrators bring humor, heart, and pathos to this audiobook. In a dystopian near future, a salvage crew endlessly digs through The Heap, the remains of Los Vertical�s, a 500-story residential tower that collapsed into ruin. While the plot develops into a madcap conspiracy, narrators David Sadzin, Allyson Ryan, Sarah Naughton, and Todd Haberkorn rotate between the characters and effectively capture their unique personalities and perspectives. Among the salvage crew is Orville Anders, who's looking for his brother, a radio host who survived the collapse and is broadcasting from inside The Heap. Joining Orville are Hans, a photographer documenting the massive project, and Lydia, who has political aspirations within the local community. The narrators also add texture with their nuanced readings of "The Later Years," excerpts from former residents that chronicle the tower's rise and fall. A.T.N. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
    • Library Journal

      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.

    • Booklist

      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.)

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