The Vertical Man

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.

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.