In 1888 in Victoria, Texas, for a simple job, a Chicago private eye gets caught up in the poker game to end all poker games.
Shannon, a Chicago private detective, returns home to Galveston, Texas for a wedding. Galveston’s new rabbi asks Shannon to find Nathan Silverberg, gone missing along with a group of swindlers who claim to be soliciting money for a future colony of Romanian Jewish refugees.
What seems to be a simple job soon pushes Shannon into stranger territory. His investigations lead him to a malevolent white-haired gambler, monstrous sand dune totems, and a group of skull-headed poker players trapped in an endless loop of cards and alcohol, who may be his only means to survive the business.
With The Silverberg Business, Robert Freeman Wexler has delivered a gloriously strange hard-boiled tale that crosses genres and defies expectations.
Genre: Horror
Shannon, a Chicago private detective, returns home to Galveston, Texas for a wedding. Galveston’s new rabbi asks Shannon to find Nathan Silverberg, gone missing along with a group of swindlers who claim to be soliciting money for a future colony of Romanian Jewish refugees.
What seems to be a simple job soon pushes Shannon into stranger territory. His investigations lead him to a malevolent white-haired gambler, monstrous sand dune totems, and a group of skull-headed poker players trapped in an endless loop of cards and alcohol, who may be his only means to survive the business.
With The Silverberg Business, Robert Freeman Wexler has delivered a gloriously strange hard-boiled tale that crosses genres and defies expectations.
Genre: Horror
Praise for this book
"Certainly the strangest book I've ever read, and strangeness is a thing that I take to. The grotesque horrors, the impossibilities, the shifting scenes, Silverberg's skull, the skull-heads, the wooden house that turns into a mansion without the detective finding it particularly odd. It is in fact a book not like anything I've ever read." - John Crowley
"Robert Freeman Wexler never fails to knock me out, and The Silverberg Business hits like a hurricane--there's strangeness and beauty on every page. The novel is that rare thing, a weird western that's truly weird, set in a Texas that's simultaneously gritty, violent, and real, yet soaked in myth. Don't miss this." - Daryl Gregory
"A haunting novel that traverses an American West inhabited by nightmarish characters, human and otherwise, The Silverberg Business evokes the unease of classic weird fiction with a contemporary gloss: William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land by way of Jim Jarmusch and Cormac McCarthy. Unnerving and unforgettable." - Elizabeth Hand
"This philosophical Jewish-Texan retro-neo-noir--at once detective story, western, and ambling picaresque--is populated by a memorable cast of schemers, toughs, and oddballs, and rendered with a keen eye and ear for detail." - J Robert Lennon
"Robert Freeman Wexler never fails to knock me out, and The Silverberg Business hits like a hurricane--there's strangeness and beauty on every page. The novel is that rare thing, a weird western that's truly weird, set in a Texas that's simultaneously gritty, violent, and real, yet soaked in myth. Don't miss this." - Daryl Gregory
"A haunting novel that traverses an American West inhabited by nightmarish characters, human and otherwise, The Silverberg Business evokes the unease of classic weird fiction with a contemporary gloss: William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land by way of Jim Jarmusch and Cormac McCarthy. Unnerving and unforgettable." - Elizabeth Hand
"This philosophical Jewish-Texan retro-neo-noir--at once detective story, western, and ambling picaresque--is populated by a memorable cast of schemers, toughs, and oddballs, and rendered with a keen eye and ear for detail." - J Robert Lennon
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