Product Description
“Liquidambar: It’s as if Philip Marlowe has stumbled down the 'Lost Highway' into 'Gormenghast', hunting for 'The Girl With The Pearl Earring'.” Jonas Wheeler, 'CitySidewalk'
Typo Blod, a reluctant investigator, is dragged into the world of Edward Hopper’s paintings where he’s compelled to solve the disappearance of beautiful Ellen Bogen.
When journalist Typo Blod encounters a stranger on public transport, he becomes absorbed by Edward Hopper’s paintings like a fly in amber.
Time halts at the instant depicted in Hopper’s most famous works and Blod’s world is thrown out of kilter. In a city tantalisingly part historical, part fantastical, Blod falls in love with Ellen Bogen, subject of Hopper’s Summertime.
As Blod struggles to persuade a magazine editor to commission some articles from him, he encounters the homeless C.O. Jones begging on a commuter train. Jones claims to be trapped in a “vicious circle” and shows Blod a book that causes Blod to slip through a crack in reality and find himself driving along a road nothing to do with the city in which he lives.
A gas station attendant fills his car’s tank with “liquid amber”, and directs him towards Fulcrum. Here, Jones re-appears to provoke Blod with questions about distant memories.
Blod’s answers propel him along a bizarre storyline. By its culmination, Blod realises his experiences have taught him to better appreciate the “liquid amber” of the present moment.
Liquidambar combines the atmosphere of Philip Marlowe’s adventures with Hopper’s characters and imagery in a surprisingly fresh detective mystery.
Typo Blod, a reluctant investigator, is dragged into the world of Edward Hopper’s paintings where he’s compelled to solve the disappearance of beautiful Ellen Bogen.
When journalist Typo Blod encounters a stranger on public transport, he becomes absorbed by Edward Hopper’s paintings like a fly in amber.
Time halts at the instant depicted in Hopper’s most famous works and Blod’s world is thrown out of kilter. In a city tantalisingly part historical, part fantastical, Blod falls in love with Ellen Bogen, subject of Hopper’s Summertime.
As Blod struggles to persuade a magazine editor to commission some articles from him, he encounters the homeless C.O. Jones begging on a commuter train. Jones claims to be trapped in a “vicious circle” and shows Blod a book that causes Blod to slip through a crack in reality and find himself driving along a road nothing to do with the city in which he lives.
A gas station attendant fills his car’s tank with “liquid amber”, and directs him towards Fulcrum. Here, Jones re-appears to provoke Blod with questions about distant memories.
Blod’s answers propel him along a bizarre storyline. By its culmination, Blod realises his experiences have taught him to better appreciate the “liquid amber” of the present moment.
Liquidambar combines the atmosphere of Philip Marlowe’s adventures with Hopper’s characters and imagery in a surprisingly fresh detective mystery.
From the Inside Flap
On a commuter train, luckless journalist Typo Blod encounters C. O. Jones, a homeless beggar. Jones claims to be trapped in a "vicious circle" and shows him a mysterious book that has a dramatic and physical effect on Blod, who slips through a crack in reality and finds himself in the driving seat of a lake placid blue Indomitable Afterglow Streetcruiser. Arriving in Fulcrum, a city tantalisingly part historical, part fantastical, he becomes obsessed with Ellen Bogen, the subject of Hopper’s painting Summertime. But there can only be so many characters in this new world (after all there’s only so much paint) and as soon as someone new appears, someone else must go. Everything is skewed — not least, the cast of femme fatales, evil Pierrots, cross-dressers, matrons of death, petty villains and hapless extortionists — but with Jones’s help, Blod learns to appreciate the 'liquid amber' of the present moment and realises he has a choice; and one that he will have to make, if ever he is to get out of Fulcrum.
