The Vertical Man - Softcover

Dalton, Matthew D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0887394612 ISBN 13: 9780887394614

Publisher: Creative Arts Book Co, 2003

Synopsis

Thaddeus Nickels just lost his job. He has misplaced his wife. The bank is about to foreclose on his house, and his steroid-pumping neighbor wants to kill him.

The author of a moderately successful science fiction series, Thaddeus is in San Francisco to put some distance between himself and his problems. He's the reluctant keynote speaker at a sci-fi convention packed with loved-starved, pimply-faced geeks. Enter Timothy Lance, a mysterious genius with an intriguing business proposition: he wants to buy the rights to a book about trading God on the stock market that Nickels hasn't written yet. What follows is a 24-hour roller coaster ride through the damp streets of San Francisco. The cast of characters includes Joey, an overzealous fan; Lloyd, a homicidal maniac with cable-access dreams; Sophia, a seductive barfly-cum-Federal agent; Rome, Thaddeus' doomed father; and Timothy Lance, the entrepreneur-king of a genetically-perfected human race, who wants Thaddeus to write the New, New Testament.

About this title

About the Author

MATTHEW D. DALTON is a California native, born and raised in the south and educated in the north. A graduate of St. Mary's College of Moraga, he holds a Master's in Creative Writing from the University of San Francisco. The manager of three bookstores in the San Francisco Bay Area, he lives with his wife and son in Oakland.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One [Excerpt]

Forget what they say about San Francisco summers. ItÕs the winters thatÕll kill you. No matter how hard you try, you canÕt get warm in the middle of a San Francisco winter. The cold sinks into your bones like a rusty knife through a frozen pound of ground round, and your spine carries the inescapable chill long into April and May.

So when the heat hit me as I stepped out of the rainy San Francisco winter afternoon into the lobby of the South Pacific Royal Hotel, filled with potted palms and hothouse hibiscus, I felt as if IÕd stepped through time and geography, into a colonial Polynesian nightmare. Overhead set into an ornately crowned ceiling, wooden paddle fans rotated in unison. A complicated system of turn-of-the-century pulleys and leather belts was strung between the fans like giant rubber bands.

Small, like an Egyptian beetle on PharaohÕs wall, was how I felt dragging my sorry ass out of the rain and into the lobby. The windows and doors all oversized floor-to-ceiling jobs. The walls painted a musty pink. The doorways, windowsills, and floorboards painted the whiter white of a nonsmoking good RepublicanÕs teeth.

Edition details

• Publisher: Creative Arts Book Co
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0887394612
• ISBN 13: 9780887394614
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 206