Beautiful Children - Softcover

It is stunning, near genius. Beautiful Children is brutal, erotic and like a wild potentially dangerous ride--it could crash at any moment. The language has a rhythm wholly it's own--a nervous kind of be-bob. It is as though Bock saved up everything for this moment--a major new talent. -- AM HOMES This Beautiful Children novel by Chuck Bock is a fucking mind-blower! It is so good practically every sentence shines. You've got a sensation on your hands. -- Sean Wilsey, author of Oh The Glory Of It All Beautiful Children is one of the finest first novels I have ever read. Brilliant, simmering, erotic, this dark adventure takes the world apart and offers it to you, piece by heart-stopping piece. -- Allison Smith, author of Name all the Animals Charles Bock takes us somewhere in Beautiful Children that most of us would be afraid to go alone: across the neon deserts of the new west and into an underworld that is the world. Follow him. This is a journey, and a novel, that allows us no turning back. -- Walter Kirn, author of Thumbsucker and Up In The Air Beautiful Children careens from the seedy to the beautiful, the domestic to the epic, all with huge and exacting heart. -- Jonathan Safran Foer

One Saturday night, in a city surrounded by desert and oversaturated with glitter is Newell Ewing. With his older, socially maladjusted mate Kenny, the two embark on Newell's first Saturday night out on the town in Vegas. Newell is twelve years old. Before the sun rises Newell has disappeared, never to be seen again. Newell's suburbanite parents, Lincoln and Lorraine, are wracked with mounting grief as their marriage begins to unravel during the unfathomable year that follows his disappearance. Bing Biderbixxe is an illustrator on a professional visit to Sin City on a hot summer day. He meets Cheri Blossom, a stripper known for her eye-popping pyrotechnic stage performance. Offstage, her drug- and porn-running boyfriend, Pony Boy, is cheating on her. With exacting suspense and original technique, Bock's panoply of Vegas's dispossessed quietly exert their influence on Newell's fate. From the new suburban shimmer of the Ewing home, to the gaudy misery of Vegas's strip clubs, to the desperate holes and punk-rock desert parties where an underclass of the marginal and meek are ignored and forgotten, Charles Bock takes us on a trip to the dark heart of America.B EAUTIFUL CHILDREN mines the humanity of its characters as it rushes head on towards a spectacular tragedy and powerful redemption.