I Disappeared Them: A Novel

Preston L. Allen

$27.95

Publication Date: April 2nd, 2024

Publisher:

Akashic Books, Ltd.

ISBN:

9781636141619

Pages:

312

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Description

A serial killer's desire to protect children fuels a parallel drive to murder other sadistic men in this immersive and literary psychological thriller.

BULLIED AS CHILD FOR BEING OVERWEIGHT and an orphan, the serial killer in I Disappeared Them hides in plain sight. By day, he is an affable family man with a disarming smile, surrounded by his children and loving wife. At night he punches the clock as a hard-working pizza man. After work, he roams Miami's nighttime streets as the Periwinkle Killer, the sociopath passing judgment on the wicked according to a twisted moral code. He believes himself to be a defender of women and children. The Everglades is filling up with the corpses of his victims. He must be stopped, but there are no clues except the periwinkles he leaves at every crime scene.

I Disappeared Them is a brutal, boy meets girl love story that delves into the Periwinkle Killer’s childhood to confront the age-old question, is a serial killer designed or destined? Like Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho and Joyce Carol Oates's Zombie, Preston L. Allen's immersive narrative hauntingly occupies the peculiar psychological landscape of a murderer.

About the Author

PRESTON L. ALLEN is the author of eight works of fiction, including Every Boy Should Have a Man, Jesus Boy, All or Nothing, and the award-winning collection Churchboys and Other Sinners. His stories have appeared in numerous magazines and journals and have been anthologized in Brown Sugar, Miami Noir, and Las Vegas Noir. The creator and host of Accents: A Poetry Jam, Preston L. Allen is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Miami Dade College. He was born in Honduras and lives in South Florida. I Disappeared Them is his latest novel.

Praise for I Disappeared Them: A Novel

Preston L. Allen's Hunter is an Everyman Dexter, a pizza-delivery guy, seething at times, sadly longing at others. A complexing hybrid of nature and nurture, defying analysis, governed by principled passion. He'll crawl into your heart and chill you from the inside out. I love it.
— Vicki Hendricks author of Miami Purity

What if you're a good person—kind, sensitive, funny—but evil won't let you be? I Disappeared Them is the story of a good man tormented, fervently wrestling right and wrong, life and murder. His battle against the demons of a secret mental chaos is a contest he can't win, and yet we can't help but enjoy the fight, every round, blood seeping out like love to its masterful end. What I mean is that Preston L. Allen kills so good, you've never seen such desperate beauty in the grisly, lovely, fleshy pages of murder that is as groundbreaking as it is gloriously literary.

Generations of illicit sex run through this clever and wide-ranging book in which the flesh always triumphs . . . Surely no one does church sexy like Allen . . . Allen's writing by turns is solemn and funny . . . It would be easy for Jesus Boy to become fluffy satire but Allen keeps his characters real.

— New York Times Book Review, on Jesus Boy

Heartfelt and occasionally hilarious, Jesus Boy is a tender masterpiece.

— Dennis Lehane

Imaginative, versatile, and daring, Allen raids the realms of myth and fairy tales in this topsy-turvy speculative fable . . . With canny improvisations on 'Jack and the Beanstalk,' 'The Epic of Gilgamesh,' and Alice in Wonderland, Allen sharpens our perceptions of class divides, racism, enslavement, and abrupt and devastating climate change to create a delectably adventurous, wily, funny, and wise cautionary parable.

— Booklist, on Every Boy Should Have a Man

As a cartographer of auto-degradation, Allen takes his place on a continuum that begins, perhaps, with Dostoyevsky's Gambler, courses through Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, William S. Burroughs's Junky, the collected works of Charles Bukowski and Hubert Selby Jr., and persists in countless novels and (occasionally fabricated) memoirs of our puritanical, therapized present. Like Dostoyevsky, Allen colorfully evokes the gambling milieu—the chained (mis)fortunes of the players, their vanities and grotesqueries, their quasi-philosophical ruminations on chance. Like Burroughs, he is a dispassionate chronicler of the addict's daily ritual, neither glorifying nor vilifying the matter at hand.

— New York Times Book Review, on All or Nothing