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The Age of Sinatra was David Ohle's long-awaited sequel to his 1972 novel Motorman. Motorman has become a cult classic among today's young writers and has inspired innovative fictioneers such as Ben Marcus, Shelley Jackson, Matthew Derby, and Brian Evenson, among others. Part political allegory, part sci-fi dystopia, the world Ohle creates in this trilogy is disturbing, yet humorous and oddly compelling.

The Pisstown Chaos is the story of a family's dislocation in the midst of chaos, disease and forced-relocation. Political power seems to be in the hands of one Reverend Herman Hooker, an "American Divine," who revels in the sufferings of others as he spouts platitudes to the ever-on-the-move masses. People are "shifted" by decree every five years, or sooner. It's all randomly done and no attempt is made to make harmonious pairings; often a five year old girl ends up in the clutches of a dirty old man. There are up shifts, down shifts and side shifts. One day you might be shining shoes in Bum Bay, the next on a pleasure cruise on your new partner's yacht. Or the opposite. In a side shift, the person is sent to a "waiting camp" to await the next round of shifting with absolutely nothing to do to occupy the time. Willywhack is the soporific of choice among those so shifted.

As chaos rages on and parasitic infestations spread, the Reverend rules with an iron fist from his Templex headquarters, utterly without mercy.

David Ohle's first novel, Motorman, was published by Knopf in 1972 under the now-legendary editorial aegis of Gordon Lish. His short fiction has appeared in Harper's, Esquire, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. He compiled and edited Cursed From Birth: the Short Unhappy Life of William S. Burroughs, Jr., published by Grove-Atlantic in 2002. A native of New Orleans, Ohle now lives in Lawrence, Kansas, and teaches at the University of Kansas. His last name rhymes with "holy." The Age of Sinatra, his long-awaited sequel to Motorman, is forthcoming in the spring of 2004 from Soft Skull Press and is timed to coincide with the reprinting of Motorman in paperback by 3rd Bed Books.

From Chapter One:

Those in the third stage of the infestation often fall into lives of murder and mayhem. In Pisstown, two of them recently asked Reverend Hooker for a starch bar, and on being refused, set upon him with jack-knives, leaving him with a bloodied face and a nicked ear. Then they stopped at the home of Peter Gramlich, a Bum Bay wig, and asked at his back window for crusts, for urpmilk, for a lump of willywhack or an old sock full of urpseed meal, for whatever could be spared. When Gramlich denied them anything, they were on him in a moment, cutting him to death with their knives, burning the wood-frame cottage to a mound of cinder with Gramlich inside.

This week we celebrate Reverend Hooker�s sixietith birthday. Now, more and more facts have come to light about the American Divine: Anyone who stepped on his shadow was given what he called a �damned Russian punishment.� He had one of his aspirants put to death by garrote because he �looked like a pinhead.� He forbade his pedalers to make left hand turns and called the left hand seat of the vehicle behind the pedaler, �the death seat,� and never sat there. He once bought a sparrow dyed yellow from a grifting stinker who told him it was a canary. He liked to turn his eyelids inside-out and look at himself in the mirror. His over-stimulated immune system contributed to psoriatic breakouts that showed themselves in pulsing red patches, some the size of playing cards. They occurred on his face, chest, legs, arms, and once or twice on the penis and scrotum. The patches came and went with time. When one vanished in a shower of white flakes, another sprouted somewhere else. Like clouds, they showed a variety of contours. Sometimes the Reverend could see a face in them. He named them and spoke to them in hushed tones. There are those who have reported seeing the Reverend on downtown pedal buses, whiskery, uncommunicative, aphasic, intoxicated, tugging at his hair, foaming at the mouth, in rumpled clothing, unable to remember his name.

The departure of a female imp from one of the Heritage Area�s most popular parks has left residents in a state of sadness. For the past five years, the imp had been living beside the brackish waters of a small lagoon in Hooker Park, and its presence inspired a devoted following. It was often spotted swimming along the lagoon's edges, munching grass on its banks. In winter, when the grass was gone, it ate the protein-rich scum, spirulina, which floated in foaming islands on the Canal six months of the year. The imp dragged the scum ashore with its webbed feet, then patted it into little biscuits and let them dry in the sun.
Last month, in a daylong journey, the imp swam across the lagoon, down a canal, and into the Bum Bay Straits. The Reverend�s Divine Guard, fearful the animal would wander into ship traffic or be drawn away in an undertow, made a successful effort to net her from a barge. Fearful she could wander again into harm's way, the Guard resolved not to return her to the lagoon, releasing her instead on the Reverend�s Square Island Research and Development Farm. �She�s a perfect specimen,� said Hooker, who had glimpsed the imp twice at the lagoon. �She must be saved for research and development.�

In keeping with the Reverend�s expressed wish, the prison facility on Permanganate Island will soon stand aside as the Island�s primary feature. Now, a complex of buildings has been constructed near the Island�s Eastern shore, far from the prison itself, devoted entirely to parasite eradication research. A group of the Reverend�s researchers has declared its intention to live on the Island and to study the mysterious parasite until the puzzle of its life cycle is solved.