2016 Electric Book Award: David Leo Rice’s ‘A Room in Dodge City’
We are pleased to announce the winner of The 2016 Electric Book Award, honoring publication, prize recognition, a cash honorarium, and full publicity packages to an unpublished manuscript. The finalist manuscripts were judged blindly by an external panel, and then the Alternating Current Editorial Staff collectively selected the winner from the finalists, in order to ensure that the chosen manuscript fully represented our press’ vision. We feel that this incredible manuscript deserves publication and attention, and the winning book will be published in February 2017. We are proud to present the winner of The Electric Book Award:
A Room in Dodge City
DAVID LEO RICE
A Room in Dodge City follows a nameless drifter into an American heart of darkness. In this nightmarish version of the historic Dodge City, mythic beasts crawl out of the woodwork; bizarre rituals are enacted; and death is never the end. Equal parts humor and horror-show, David Leo Rice’s novel combines the mundaneness of modern life — motels, strip malls, temp jobs — with something stranger, darker, and more eternal. Told through linked vignettes that read like metaphoric fairytales gone wrong, Dodge City consumes the reader just as it slowly consumes the drifter, leaving all to wonder whether any of us can ever truly escape this world — or our own.
“The writing is David Lynch meets Neil Gaiman meets Samuel Beckett and the Theater of the Absurd. Just as Dodge City is a place the narrator can never leave, Rice’s book sucks you in and doesn’t let you walk out of it intact, either.” — Nick Antosca, author of The Girlfriend Game, Midnight Picnic, and Fires, and creator of Syfy’s Channel Zero
DAVID LEO RICE is a writer and animator from Northampton, Massachusetts, currently living in New York City. His stories have appeared in Black Clock, The Collagist, Birkensnake, Hobart, The Rumpus, The New Haven Review, Identity Theory, Nat. Brut, and elsewhere. This is his first novel. He has a B.A. in Esoteric Studies from Harvard University and can be found at raviddice.com and at @raviddice on Twitter.
CHRISTINA COLLINS is illustrating the novel. She is a writer, visual artist, and musician, living in Minneapolis. She holds an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop and is a founding editor of Lockjaw Magazine and the author of the forthcoming poetry collection, Marrowlicker, due in 2017 from Alternating Current Press. Find her at yourfriendchristina.com and at @xtinarc on Twitter.
We are proud to be putting forth this book for an AWP book launch in February 2017. Please stay tuned to our website and news feeds for further information as the book unfolds. You can preorder it now.
