Description: "You ready to harrow Hell, Honey?"
In this debut story collection from Justin Lee, the reader will descend into a phantasmagoria at once sensual, violent, grotesque, and unbearably tender. A hypnotist summons gods and unearths life-destroying memories. A demon haunts a child-murderer on the eve of his execution. And a mother's fetus irrevocably fuses to her body like a conjoined twin.
Hells of the heart and mind are dredged. Christ confronts Cthulhu. And beauty comes stained in blood.
Here, guilt and erotic compulsion and the hyperventilating dread of damnation give shape to a landscape haunted by monsters both timeless and eerily new, the familiar demons of ancient memory stalking alongside the disfigurements of the present.
A Prisoner's Cinema casts pitiless light on the shadows of souls who have forgotten God or stubbornly ignore Him. And yet there is grace--even for the monsters among us.
Brief description: Justin Lee is an associate editor at First Things magazine. A graduate of the MFA fiction program at the University of California, Irvine, he was awarded an Emerging Writers grant by the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Passage Prize for Fiction, and named a Claremont Institute Lincoln Fellow. His stories and essays have appeared in The American Mind, FLAUNT, The Independent, Los Angeles Review of Books, New Haven Review, The New York Post, Return, The Saturday Evening Post, The Spectator, Vice, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. He lives in Manhattan.