Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Thriller / suspense fiction
Weblink
www.richardchiem.com

KING OF JOY

Richard Chiem

A totally original debut by young Asian-American writer Richard Chiem, about a woman named Corvus seeking relief from the grief of losing her husband and first real love to suicide who finds herself at a dangerous and manipulative underground porn studio deep in the woods. The ending is fantastical, violent, and pretty unforgettable.

Corvus has always had an overactive imagination. Growing up, she develops a unique coping mechanism: she can imagine herself out of any situation, no matter how terrible. To get through each day, Corvus escapes into scenes from fantasy novels, pop songs, and action/adventure movies, and survives by turning the everyday into just another role to play in the movie of her life.

After a tragic loss, Corvus finds a sadness so great she cannot imagine it away. Instead, she finds Tim, a pornographer with unconventional methods, who offers her a new way to escape into movies. But when a sinister plot of greed and betrayal is revealed, Corvus must fight to reclaim her independence, and discovers she is stronger than even she could have imagined.

KING OF JOY is equal parts sledgehammer and sweet song, a neon, pulsing portrait of grief from one of the most exciting and risk-taking new literary voices. It tells the triumphant, electrifying story of one woman's quest for survival against all odds, and serves as a reminder that resilience can be found even in our most hopeless moments.

Richard Chiem is the author of ?You Private Person (Scrambler Books, 2012; Sorry House, 2017), which was named one of Publishers Weekly?'s 10 Essential Books of the American West. His work has been published in ?City Arts, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Fanzine, 3:AM Magazine, and Moss?, among many other venues. He has taught at Hugo House and at the University of Washington Bothell.

Available products
Book Published 2019-03-05 by Soft Skull
Book Published 2019-03-05 by Soft Skull

Comments

The Seattle Times featured his book launch as one of the hottest events of the month Read more...

There are overtones of David Lynch and Denis Johnson. . . . Chiem excels at fine, metaphorical finesse.

In King of Joy, Richard Chiem shows us what it is to live in the immediate, day-to-day song of forever grief. Each sentence is masterfully written and equally afflicted by the one craving that affects us all, which is the desire to belong. These pages turn pain over and over in its raw mouth, exposing what it is like to feel longing in its deepest, most hidden form, and teach us more than we could have ever hoped to learn about pure love, loss, and the hard work of accepting the human condition.

Richard Chiem writes like someone whispering in your ear. He's insistent and methodical, and you want to hear every word he has to say. King of Joy takes Chiem's unparalleled voice and carefully amplifies it, ratcheting the tension until you're not sure where he stops and you begin. It is a brilliant, tender examination of the unholy magnitude of trauma. It shows how pain can simultaneously destroy and preserve a person. Most of all, it is just goddamn beautiful writing.

What did I just read? I don't really know, but it was just a little bit mind-bending. Chiem's writing is mesmerizing and perfectly suited to a skipping narrative full of strange and disturbing things (there are porn movie sets and hippos and a very good dog). I can't wait to see what he writes next.

King of Joy is a perfect rendering of that feeling of dark and hopeful closeness with loss I've always known but could never put to words.

Announcement: Seattle author Richard Chiem launches his dreamy, beautifully written, hippo-inflected, grief-soaked debut novel, King of Joy, in Elliott Bay's basement book cathedral tonight.... (March 5, 2019) Read more...

Nylon included King of Joy as a great book to read this month: "...This is a book about grief, about trauma and recovery, the ways the world destroys us and the ways we accelerate the destruction of our world. All of it is told in Chiem's inimitable voice; it's unsentimental, hypnotic stuff, you'll race through it, heart beating, eyes burning, recognizing your own secrets on every page." Read more...

Paperback Paris featured it as one of the best debuts of March (which is lovely even if King of Joy isn't Richard's debut): "All it took was two chapters before I found myself helplessly bound to Corvus' rebounding depression, as such angst does not resist the urge to leap from Chiem's poetic prose and enter the mind of its unwitting victim. I was no exception, and once you've taken the deep dive into King of Joy, just know you have a tribe of admirers waiting to talk you through whatever you're feeling." Read more...

This novel is transfixing: an imaginative meditation on emotional survival, isolation, and the beauty and limitations of human connection. I love Chiem's writing.

The Seattle Review of Books mentioned Richard and his book in an article on Seattle's LitCrawl, and gave a shout out to the book cover, calling it "goddamned beautiful," Read more...

What a funny, fresh, bittersweet masterpiecethere is no one else in the world writing like Richard Chiem. From the sentence-level wizardry to the racing plot, I feel smarter just having read this. Every page brings a new set of wonders.

[Chiem's] fiction uses passiveness to great effect, employs it as a way to examine the world. . . . You might think that a 200-page novel about a young woman who is all but emotionally dead might be boring, or aimless, or as empty as its protagonist. You would be underestimating Chiem's considerable talents. There's an energy seething behind the words in King of Joy, an outrage and a demand for justice, that drives the story onward. . . . It goes to some delightfully weird places. Read more...

Dennis Cooper did a celebratory King of Joy post on his blog!: "He's one of my favorite younger writers. I'm kind of in awe of his prose, which has so many seemingly at odd qualities, from utter precision to deep mysteriousness, happening concurrently that his writing, or its effect, can seem almost 3-dimensional a lot of the time. Read more...

Richard Chiem has followed up his collection You Private Person with a novel centered around a young woman for whom pop culture serves as a literal means of escape from the stresses of the world around her. Chiem's novel explores our relationship to film and music even as it posits an intriguing take on grief and trauma. Read more...

This experimental literary novel is the right amount of both dreamy and dark. . . lush, packed with jarring details, and surprisingly tender. . . . a delicious, demonic novel that fades through adjacent, looping worlds in the magical early 2000s. Chiem evokes a lost decade and suggests the shape of the monsters that churned beneath its surface.

The inner monologue is hypnotic, the sentence structure singular and kind of insane, and this debut novel talks about loss and grief in a way that might cut you open. Fair warning. Oh, and the hippos, yes.hippos. It's an art-house thriller with heart, shot through with the levity of pop music and mixed with bizarre but accurate meditations on grief and loss. You are in a universe that is clearly its own (like MRS. CALIBAN but much more twisted).