Drifter, Stories (Summer Edition)

One of Southwest Review's Top 10 Must-Read Books of 2021

Collecting a decade's worth of stories by acclaimed author David Leo Rice, Drifter is a wild trip through the occult and surreal undercurrents of contemporary life. Ever in pursuit of illumination and unholy opportunity, the characters in these stories roam from blighted Western settlements to eerie New England circuses, from the backwoods of Austria to the remotest reaches of Japan, and from seedy Caribbean islands to the shadow of the Swiss Alps.

Blessed and cursed with the freedom to transgress all boundaries-between waking and dreaming, home and exile, even life and death-Rice's Drifters operate in the shadows of our world, revealing how frayed the fabric of reality has become.

Rice's fiction touches on the strange, phantasmagorical, and horrific, but juxtaposes those elements with headier explorations of narratives and the self; it's like little else out there. -Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Like peering through a slit at some brilliant, brutal new world, DRIFTER is unnerving and audaciously intelligent, full of wild possibility, dark humor, and lurking doom. With all the visceral detail and haunting logic of a beautiful, disturbing dream, Rice stylishly explores the grim, the hidden, the unhinged.- Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light

A grotesque spectacle of unreality. - Matthew Baker, author of WHY VISIT AMERICA

Somewhere Between Bradbury and Ligotti, Rice folds centuries of Americana into a space unstuck from time, where everything is an anachronism. Here, he explores the blurry divisions between adulthood and childhood, the seeming impossibility of atonement, the madness of certainty.- B.R. Yeager, author of Negative Space

I'm trying to remember the last time a collection of stories so captured my attention by the strength of its voices and sense of presence in each of its living moments. Think Brian Evenson's Fugue State, or Susan Steinberg's early collections. There's such life here, such clarity of vision. It's exhilarating to watch a writer like Rice engage his ambitions so immediately and with a seemingly inexhaustible well of ideas. This is a magnificent book. - Grant Maierhofer

...both eerily dense and unreal. Gloriously inventive, sober and freakish, this is a collection to relish. - Gary J. Shipley

Grotesque and tender, irreal and grounded, nostalgic, forward-looking, and of the moment, David Leo Rice's Drifter, as its title suggests, isn't easily sited. Imagine going to a video store ca. 1998 and renting tapes at random from the "Cult Movies" section, but every tape you pick makes you want to tell all of your friends, "You have to see this." You have to read Drifter. -Gabriel Blackwell, author of Babel and CORRECTION

These stories hit you like those stairs, one after another after another, truly relentless until you hit the bottom. Looking up at those stairs you can see just how far you have fallen, just how far Rice has pushed you. - A.S. Coomer