One Night in Copan

Book excerpt: From the author of A PALER SHADE OF RED -- Memoirs of a Radical; FLIGHT FROM EIN SOF and THE INVENTOR comes this collection of gritty, satirical, chilling, iconoclastic, always ferocious and unrepentant dystopias. Death and virgin birth, immortality and cannibalism, paradise and hell, the cosmos, bigotry and vigilantism, close encounters, wars to end all wars, hallucinations, disquieting prophecies and insanity -- mainly insanity -- are the forces that drive ONE NIGHT IN COPAN. Oscillating between parody and polemic, allegory and unalloyed horror, paradox and hyperbole, the apocalyptic canvases W. E. Gutman paints can be read as one man's antidote for the despotism of inflexible creeds and the paralyzing effects of groupthink. A work of hyper-realism, this collection of thirteen tales uses bizarre, fantastic, sometimes ghoulish, always disquieting devices to capture and expose truths that people ensconced in ideological cocoons ignore, shirk or refute. About the Author Born in Paris, W. E. Gutman is a veteran journalist and author. A former writer at OMNI magazine and U.S. editor of Science in the USSR, he covered politics and human rights in Central America from 1994 to 2006. He lives with his wife in southern California.