The Deification, by Jack Remick

The Deification
ISBN: 978-1-60381-134-7
Paperback: $18.95
Ebook: $4.95

The Deification (358 pages) is a picaresque novel by Seattle author Jack Remick that pays homage to the legendary San Francisco beat poets. Some of Remick’s influences include Kerouac’s On the Road and The Dharma Bums and Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.

“The novel is a masculine got-you-by-the-throat wild ride, a coming of age and a coming into agelessness myth.… The Deification is pilgrimage, with religious and Beat reference aplenty—homage to the Beats. Eddie’s search for the way to become a poet, and to learn who he is involves mental and spiritual and physical sacrifice on a frightening scale…. Remick’s stories are made of strong stuff—blood and guts and seedy life, and grand scale mythic transformations, all at a careening pace. In the reading you can feel the writing, the rush directly from Remick’s brain to his pen–an almost steady sensation of acceleration.”  Read more….

—Pamela Hobart Carter, The Seattle Star

“If American literature produces one On the Road per century, then The Deification by Jack Remick is it for the twenty-first century. This road trip saga of would-be poet Eddie Iturbi from Sanger to San Francisco, from innocence to art, is fast, hot, thick, mythic, erudite, erotic, and intense. The prose is lush, the story, irresistible. Remick inscribes these vivid, gender-morphing characters on the California landscape as if they’d always been there. I believe The Deification will be passed from hand to hand for a long time to come.”
—Priscilla Long, author of The Writer’s Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life and Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of America’s Bloody Coal Industry

“Eddie skids along a twisted road of mind-bending drama where characters reek of the human condition in an era featuring drugs, sex and jazz. Remick’s main character starts out as a naïve and hopeful young man who wants to be a poet like Jack Kerouac more than anything else in his life. We watch his transformation as he maneuvers his way through the underbelly of street life, a desperate yet cunning survivor.”
—Marie Romero Cash, author of the Jemimah Hodge Mysteries

To be a writer in America, you have to bleed. Eddie Iturbi, a young car-thief obsessed with the dark magic of Beat culture in a mythic San Francisco, sets off on a spaced-out crusade to connect with the Beat gods. En route Eddie links up with living legend Leo Franchetti, the last of the Beat poets. Leo sends Eddie to the Buzzard Cult, where a mysterious mentor reveals the writer’s ritual of blood and words. Changed and invigorated and back in the City, Eddie falls in love with a snake dancer at the Feathered Serpent. She can’t save him from Scarred Wanda, jealous bad-girl of literature, whose goal is to destroy Eddie before Jack Kerouac relays all the magical secrets of the literary universe. Immortality is just a book away. Will Eddie live long enough to write it?

Jack Remick at Jack Kerouac’s grave

Says Remick, “I grew up in California’s Central Valley. The Valley was huge but stifling. If you climbed the water tower one foggy night and the cops hauled you down, it made the local newspaper. Your one goal was a customized car with a flame job and flipper hubcaps. You wore Levis or Chinos and you cut your hair short. And then along came Jack Kerouac and On The Road. Right behind him came William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg …. On The Road and the Beatniks set me free. Get out of the Valley, they said. Go find your America. And some of us did. …. This novel, The Deification, pays homage to those wild men whose vision of the world opened up the social revolution of the 1960s. They changed everything.”

Jack Remick is a poet, short story writer, and novelist. The Deification is the first book of a series, The California Quartet. More volumes will be released by Coffeetown Press in 2012: Valley Boy, The Book of Changes, and Trio of Lost Souls. Blood, A Novel was published by Camel Press in 2011. Also coming from Coffeetown in 2012: Gabriela and the Widow. You can find Jack online at blood.camelpress.com.

The Deification is currently available on Amazon.com, the European Amazons and Amazon Japan. The Kindle edition retails for $5.95. Other eBook versions can be purchased on Smashwords and through most major eBook retailers. Wholesale orders can be placed through info@coffeetownpress.com, Ingram, and Baker & Taylor. Libraries can also purchase books through Follett Library Resources or Midwest Library Services.

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Also available in Kindle and in other eBook formats on Smashwords.

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