Waiting Period - Hardcover

Selby Jr., Hubert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0714530719 ISBN 13: 9780714530710

Publisher: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd, 2002

Synopsis

In this highly polished and slightly twisted moral tale, a man pulls back from the brink of suicide when his application to buy a gun with which to shoot himself is delayed. Instead of throwing his life away, he decides to spend all his time and effort disposing of those who he feels deserve to die. Targeting a bureaucrat in the Veterans’ Administration, he devises an ingenious method of murdering people without trace. With a renewed zest for living he embarks on a joyful killing spreeI>

Hubert Selby Jr. was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1928. After a career in the merchant marine cut short by illness, he achieved international recognition for his acclaimed cult classic, Last Exit to Brooklyn. Darren Aronofsky’s film adaptation of Selby’s Requiem for a Dream, starring Jared Leto and Ellen Burstyn was one of independent cinema’s biggest hits in 2001.

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Also available:

The Room

TP $14.95, 0-7145-3038-7 · CUSA

The Demon

TP $14.95, 0-7145-2599-5 · CUSA

Song of the Silent Snow

TP $14.95, 0-7145-3050-6 · CUSA

The Willow Tree

TC $25.95, 0-7145-3024-7 · CUSA

About this title

About the Author

Hubert Selby Jr. was born in Brooklyn New York in 1928. After a career in the merchant marine cut short by illness, he achieved international recognition for Last Exit To Brooklyn. His other novels include The Room in 1971, The Demon in 1976, The Willow Tree in 1998 and a collection of stories, Song of the Silent Snow, in 1986, all published by Marion Boyars.

From Publishers Weekly

Selby's latest offers a chilling look into the mind of a killer, as the author of Last Exit to Brooklyn uses stream-of-consciousness first-person narration to slowly transform his anonymous male narrator from a paranoid, disaffected war veteran into a deranged murderer. The catalytic event that initiates the transformation is the narrator's attempt to purchase a gun to commit suicide, but when a brief waiting period ensues, he decides instead to get even with his various tormentors. The first target is the bureaucrat at the Veterans Administration who has been denying the narrator his benefits, an alleged injustice he remedies by slipping the man a lethal dose of E. coli bacteria. The narrator goes through a brief period of killer's remorse, during which he almost confesses to a newsstand operator, but once his jitters pass, he targets a local TV celebrity for another dose of lethal bacteria. From there he goes completely over the edge, building a homemade crossbow as he explores the feasibility of using explosives to facilitate similar attacks in various cities around the country. Selby's style is relentless, harrowing and frighteningly effective, albeit somewhat monotonous and tough to read; this might have been a better novel if Selby had introduced some secondary characters and broken up the first-person narrative into chapters built around each incident. Still, in a world in which the reach of terrorism seems to grow on a daily basis, this story is a disturbing reminder of how vulnerable we are to attacks from the discontented and deranged, regardless of their location or nationality.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0714530719
• ISBN 13: 9780714530710
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 155