Marshall McLemon, lowly curator of the prodigious WentWest archive, has long harboured the dream of constructing from it a gargantuan online museum of popular culture. However, under the patronage of JP Gillespie, WentWest's philistinic local overseer, it's a dream destined to remain unrealised. When the chairman and CEO of WentWest Europe arrives to berate Gillespie for failing to bring an end to the year long plague visited upon the company by the hacktivist group, Mantra, it seems as if McLemon may have uncovered a patron rich and powerful enough to show JP the error of all of his ways. But just as his backing seems secure, Marshall begins to discern the elephant of corruption in the boardroom, and he wonders if he should put a glorious future in jeopardy by drawing attention to it. Listening for the voice of his conscience all he hears is the insistent mantra of ironic dissent. “Welcome to Coolsville," it says. "Cover your ass. Pass the buck. Resistance is futile.” Jason Mordaunt's Welcome To Coolsville is fast, funny and utterly original - Thomas Pynchon meets Flann O'Brien. An astonishing debut which marks the arrival of a formidable new novelist. |
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