The Visitors

Description

On the eve of the Occupy Wall Streetprotests, C is flat broke. Once a renowned textile artist, she’s now the soleproprietor of an arts supply store in Lower Manhattan. Divorced, alone, atloose ends, C is stuck with a struggling business, a stack of bills, a newerotic interest in her oldest girlfriend, and a persistent hallucination in theform of a rogue garden gnome with a pointed interest in systems collapse . . . C needs to put her medical debt andher sex life in order, but how to make concrete plans with this little visitorhaunting her apartment, sporting a three-piece suit and delivering impromptulectures on the vulnerability of the national grid? Moreover, what’s all thiscomputer code doing in the story of her life? And do the answers to all of C’squestions lie with an eco-hacktivist cabal threatening to end modern life as weknow it? Replaying recent history through adistorting glass, The Visitors is a mordantly funny tour through a worldwhere not only civic infrastructure but our darkest desires (not to mention ournovels) are vulnerable to malware; where mythical creatures talk like DonDeLillo; where love is little more than a blip in our metadata. It peers intoHow We Got Here and asks What We Do Next, charting the last days of a brokenstatus quo as the path is cleared for something new.