Magician by Christopher Zeischegg

California brings out the fucking worst in people. Makes them junkies, whores, killers - failed saints, predatory sinners. Must be something in the land or maybe the water. Something old and evil. Waiting. The Magician is an incantatory trip to this cursed heart of darkness. A modern horror tale of sexual violence and deep psychological harm. Unflinchingly narrated in spare, economic prose climaxing in hallucinatory brutality, Christopher Zeischegg has conjured a dark fable of the American dream as it slides into unending nightmare.

"The Magician is an incredibly nuanced, unsettling novel that, like magic itself, remakes our understanding of reality by delving deep into the cracks between personal narrative and what takes place only unseen. Armed with arcane experience, seminal insight, and a magnetic knack for splicing LA noir with autofiction on the fly, Christopher Zeischegg is a 1-of-a-kind creative icon, the kind you’ll have a hard time ever forgetting no matter how it makes you feel."
—Blake Butler, author of Molly

"One of the most exciting living writers. Reading a Christopher Zeischegg book is like stepping into a dream in which anything can happen—his particular combination of sex, death, beauty, and horror often feels downright transcendent."
—Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I'm Someone Else

"In tight staccato paragraphs, Christopher Zeischegg’s The Magician conjures a late night kerosene huff where death and desire intersect. A gothic, black-clad love child nestled between Gira’s The Consumer and the purer 1965 version of John Fowles’ The Magus, The Magician is a dirty hypodermic slipped under the Botoxed skin of sunny Los Angeles recovery literature that would have you believe redemption is possible—Zeischegg knows otherwise."
—James Nulick, author of Plastic Soul