Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Liminal States
    Unavailable
    Liminal States
    Unavailable
    Liminal States
    Ebook737 pages10 hours

    Liminal States

    By Zack Parsons

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    “An awe-inspiring, helter-skelter journey through mind-blowing SF, western dime novel, noir mystery, and near-future dystopian horror” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
     
    The debut novel from Zack Parsons, editor of the Something Awful website and author of My Tank Is Fight!, is a mind-bending journey through time and genres. Beginning in 1874, with a blood-soaked western story of revenge, Liminal States follows a trio of characters through a 1950s noir detective story and twenty-first-century sci-fi horror. Their paths are tragically intertwined—and their choices have far-reaching consequences for the course of American history.
     
    It’s a remarkable mashup that “somehow manages to become a cohesive, thought-provoking whole . . . There’s no way a novel with this many moving parts should hold together, but it does, and even readers initially daunted by the jumble will soon be glad to go wherever Parsons takes them” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
     
    “Parsons’s debut is a tour-de-force, a justifiably showy demonstration of the author’s chameleon-like ability to write in several genres all at once, and it emerges as one of the scariest and bleakest tales I can remember.” —Cory Doctorow
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateMar 27, 2012
    ISBN9780806535517
    Unavailable
    Liminal States

    Read more from Zack Parsons

    Related to Liminal States

    Related ebooks

    Science Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Two Poems by Phillip B. Williams

      Dec 15, 2017

      The masters are yet dead. Wanting to be human,I tried to rewrite The Waste Land. The canon’s reachcasts ruinous light. The masters’ pens breachthis page where, above, my own hand spectates. Babylonrisen, exorcism in reverse, whose nature upended now?

      6 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Mar 1, 2020

      All the animals you knowwill die. You set foodout for them anyway,let the oily seeds fallamong the fiddleheadsto be ground downpermanent as bone.The forest fills and unfills,drops itself down roottubes and turns to dark lace.One undoing: leafto sparr

      1 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Jan 1, 2020

      In class, I stared because of the blood going blue.The chalk that coated our fingerly teeth.The way we lapped each other (on the shorewhere the flowering). I gave away our location. Smacked my lips in the coat closet.Sucked at her teeth. We, on all e

      4 min read

    • Article

      Perfect Prose II

      May 15, 2020

      Perfect Prose II
      4 min read

    • Article

      Learning To Walk

      Oct 28, 2019

      Learning To Walk
      5 min read

    • Article

      In The Spotlight: Your Writing Genre - Busting

      Apr 4, 2024

      What an inventive lot the WM writers proved themselves to be with the ‘Genre-busting' submission call! The response was terrific, with a postbag full of playful, off-the wall writing that read as if its creators had a gonzo riot mashing up elements f

      5 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Jan 1, 2024

      When the call cameshe ran. Outside, outthe back door, screamingNo No, got to thefence and ran back, droppedto her knees and pawedat the earth, clawingup handfuls of grass.She was howling. Aululation. Something I’d never heardbefore. Likea wild horse

      3 min read

    • Article

      Named After the Animal

      Oct 13, 2020

      Named After the Animal
      18 min read

    • Article

      from BLACK PASTORAL

      Nov 1, 2023

      somewheres, some lifetimes ago I have run so far, so long.There is nowhere I haven’t beenBut here, in this field, a bodyLength from the ragged brinkThat gives way to forest.I collapsed here, the thin, hard slipOf me whittled at both ends.I want badly

      4 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems by Rohan Chhetri

      Sep 8, 2020

      All summer the half voice lurked behind me & I played deaf for days for to live To not write about it to use my body Part the river’s flesh to operate Machinery is human too to love & for once stay awake through it all. Now it comes like the deer sle

      3 min read

    • Article

      How the Cicada Screams

      Dec 1, 2020

      How the Cicada Screams
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Final Truth

      Jan 21, 2020

      The Final Truth
      5 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      May 1, 2022

      —after Gerrit van Honthorst’s “Samson and Delilah,” c. 1621 They’ve made a monster of me, marring my namefor eternity. I’m not Delilah,but Laila. I loved him. Each night, in bed, after our bodies became one body, he would succumb to sleep, resting hi

      3 min read

    • Article

      Nick Laird

      Dec 15, 2017

      I was trying to write like an adult.I had children.I was at the end of something. As I waited at my table by the window for the coffee,I saw that the sirocco had depositeda scrim of dust on the sill overnight,and it was the dark red of powdered blood

      3 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Jul 1, 2023

      nothing so lonely as the hospitalbed. nothing so lonely as beinglonely in the hospital bed. nothingso jargoned as the body sproutingbrush tuber cannula or rue. nothingso pure as the abstracted by which Imean exploded body, the body thatholds its skin

      1 min read

    • Article

      Mrs Macarthur’s Secret Diary

      Jun 17, 2020

      Mrs Macarthur’s Secret Diary
      7 min read

    • Article

      Mrs Macarthur’s Secret Diary

      Jun 17, 2020

      Mrs Macarthur’s Secret Diary
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Inventions of Witches

      Oct 30, 2017

      The Inventions of Witches
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Epic Of Gilgamesh

      Jan 1, 2020

      My friends, who can reach heaven? The monster bellows like a river swollen with flood.Many are consumed in his fiery breath. My friends, who can reach heaven? Let us ask the mountain for a sign.Let us cut the spirits from the cedars. My friends, who

      3 min read

    • Article

      Collins Ferry Landing

      Jul 1, 2020

      for my father Only rivers bottom out like this.Only rivers bottom out with this kind of conviction.Not humans, or, at least, not humans asindisputably human as you were,trapped in consciousness’s surplus, exilic,animalized absurdity, writhing in its

      5 min read

    • Article

      Cricket League

      Jan 1, 2023

      Mythological Creature Ryan Coppa, age 9 Shaker Heights, OH The Day with Cerberus “But it’s unfair!” I protested. “For the last time, no World Series tickets,” Dad explained. I stomped to my room, not turning back. When I entered my room, I saw a m

      11 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      May 1, 2023

      It has to be one of the gloomiest human characteristicsto wish for something from the pastto return again: So when my girl callsand says she wants her first room back,the one that gurgled and swayed, suspending herin that gravity-free chamber of my b

      2 min read

    • Article

      What The Magpie Says

      Oct 16, 2022

      What The Magpie Says
      8 min read

    • Article

      Dark Tales

      Dec 2, 2021

      Dark Tales
      6 min read

    • Article

      How the Lark Got Her Crest

      May 30, 2023

      How the Lark Got Her Crest
      15 min read

    • Article

      Meditations On Ghosts

      Nov 1, 2022

      I believed, once, in Ouija boards, of standing in front of my own reflection mouthing Bloody _____, Bloody _____, Bloody _____ —& how still I hesitate because I know words transfigure tongues as easily as brain, transfigure to spells cast without my

      4 min read

    Reviews for Liminal States

    3.5/5

    37 ratings3 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 1/5
      This is a terrible book. Overly long, portentous, badly written and humorless. ZP does seem to have done a great job with marketing, however, including a puff piece on Boing Boing, which is what convinced me to take a risk on it. There are also dozens of reviews on Amazon saying that the book is a flawless, genre-smashing masterpiece: I am very sceptical about where those reviews came from because Parsons is not even a competent writer . It's rare that I feel ripped off by a book, even when I don't enjoy it that much, but this was an exception.
    • 2/5
      I do not know how to write an introductory paragraph for my review as to what this book is about. After reading 120 pages, I'm still clueless, except that the portion I read involved two men killing each other again and again because they had stumbled on some sort of evil pool of everlasting life.The writer can describe scenes well, especially pain, suffering, and bloody, gory deaths. I don't know if he can write a likable character, because none of them were that I read about. Mostly, I didn't mind them dying again and again because they were so unlikable, but it became boring. I didn't get to the change in the plot. I did dip into the book several places further on, reading the ending, and it was all still a confusion of no-sense. Obviously, this is not a book for me, although, mystifyingly enough, my daughter really did like it and recommended it to me. So, if you like disjointed thoughts, well described bloody and depressing horror, and very obscure plots, this may be the book for you.
    • 4/5
      The sum is much greater than the individual parts which are a crap western, a so-so noir detective story and an OK sci-fi - all threaded with a horror story. The idea bringing them all together is however fantastic and elevates the book far above its constituent parts.