Crooked

by Austin Grossman

Overview

Award-winning novelist Austin Grossman reimagines the Cold War as an epic battle against the occult waged by the ultimate American antihero: Richard Nixon.

Richard Milhous Nixon lived one of the most improbable lives of the twentieth century. Our thirty-seventh president's political career spanned the button-down fifties, the Mad Men sixties, and the turbulent seventies. He faced down the Russians, the Chinese, and ultimately his own government. The man went from political mastermind to a national joke, sobbing in the Oval Office, leaving us with one burning question: how could he have lost it all?

Here for the first time is the tale told in his own words: the terrifying supernatural secret he stumbled upon as a young man, the truth behind the Cold War, and the truth behind the Watergate cover-up. What if our nation's worst president was actually a pivotal figure caught in a desperate struggle between ordinary life and horrors from another reality? What if the man we call our worst president was, in truth, our greatest?

In Crooked, Nixon finally reveals the secret history of modern American politics as only Austin Grossman could reimagine it. Combining Lovecraftian suspense, international intrigue, Russian honey traps, and a presidential marriage whose secrets and battles of attrition were their own heroic saga, Grossman's novel is a masterwork of alternative history, equal parts mesmerizing character study and nail-biting Faustian thriller.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316198523
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	08/02/2016
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Austin Grossman is a video game design consultant and the author of You and Soon I Will Be Invincible, which was nominated for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. His writing has appeared in Granta, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Editorial Reviews

"Ingenious ... every moment [is] perfectly motivated ... more believable than the truth. CROOKED works as gleeful satire, as wacky alternate history, and as a thriller, but what really shines is the character study at its center."—Neil Hollands, Library Journal (starred review)

"Crooked confirms and details the extremely esoteric and occult presence we always suspected lay at the heart of the Nixon administration. It's got spies, and political intrigue, and a sitting President spilling his own blood onto a pentagram hidden beneath the Oval Office rug, which is to say there are few of my buttons this book does not push."—John Darnielle, Author of Wolf in White Van

"At once wildly imaginative and deeply intimate, CROOKED is a demonically fun political thriller. The brilliance of Austin Grossman is in making big stories personal, even when the big story is super-powered presidents and intercontinental necromantic missiles."—Max Barry, author of Lexicon

"In telling the secret story of Richard Nixon, Austin Grossman draws back the curtain on American history. Senator Joe McCarthy should have been much, much more frightened. Once I started reading Crooked, I couldn't put it down. But be warned, even as you devour this book, it will devour you."—Daniel O'Malley, author of The Rook

From the Publisher

05/04/2015
Richard Nixon, the narrator of this audacious genre-bending novel from Grossman (You), purports to tell the “real story of Watergate.” In a voice that sounds authentically Nixonian, the disgraced 37th president reminisces about most of the important people from his past, including his wife, Pat (“beautiful and intelligent” but “also odd”); his opponent in the 1960 presidential race, John F. Kennedy (“Kennedy smiled at me with his irresistible grin and even in that moment I felt drawn to him”); and Henry Kissinger (whose “singsong accent seemed borrowed from a German burlesque show”). The political autobiography turns into a Cold War spy caper, and then into a series of supernatural adventures bordering on Lovecraftian horror. (“The hole in the wall was expanding, slowly. Beyond I saw stars and a bulky shape silhouetted against them.”) The implied climactic cataclysm doesn’t quite come off, but otherwise Grossman has done a fine job of combining history, thriller, and weird tale. Agent: Luke Janklow, Janklow & Nesbit. (July)

Publishers Weekly

★ 04/15/2015
In Grossman's ingenious latest (after Soon I Will Be Invincible and You), sad-sack Richard Nixon slanders and lies his way into the House of Representatives, consorts with Soviet spies to achieve national prominence, hobnobs with the wizard Henry Kissinger to obtain the presidency, and through it all remains unable to win the approval of his wife, let alone the American people. It seems the Cold War has a dimension hidden from most observers: a supernatural battle of occult forces pitting the magic of the Oval Office and the sorcerer-like powers of Dwight Eisenhower against dark forces abroad. Perhaps it's a tribute to the inexplicability of Nixon's real career and many comebacks, but Grossman succeeds in making his fantastic explanation seem more believable than the truth. VERDICT This novel works as gleeful satire, as wacky alternate history, and as thriller, but what really shines is the character study at its center. Nixon's self-loathing, longing for appreciation, and inability to please his beloved motivate every moment perfectly, ultimately creating a narrator who is pathetic, yet at the same time sympathetic. [See Prepub Alert, 2/2/15.]—Neil Hollands, Williamsburg Regional Lib., VA

Library Journal

2015-04-28
Henry Kissinger, dark lord of the universe? If you're a student of the late Christopher Hitchens or William Shawcross, the idea won't seem far-fetched. Grossman (You, 2013, etc.) takes it into fictional realms with this oddball book, which opens with none other than "Tricky" Dick Nixon giving a long soliloquy of a confession: "I outlived the hippies," he says, "I outlived Elvis and Marlene Dietrich and the Soviet Union itself. It's been twenty years since I was forced to stage my own death." Say what? A stake doesn't hold his heart to the Yorba Linda soil? Nope, for the eternal Nixon, bearing an eldritch tattoo administered by Henry the K and full of secrets and lies, isn't the only evil being in the piece; indeed, after a fashion, as "the last of the American sorcerer-presidents," he's been helping save the world from all manner of mischief that plays out under the general rubric of the Cold War, giving new meaning to the phrase "Evil Empire." It takes Grossman, who's apparently been reading up on his H.P. Lovecraft, a while to fill this saggy balloon with enough gas to give it loft, and there's way too much talk and way too little action, unless you count Pat Nixon's discussion of her voting record as action. A sometimes-confusing timeline doesn't help matters. Still, and even if the story is an inconsequential confection in the end, it's pleasing to allow Nixon, who revisits his checkered career throughout Grossman's pages, supernatural leeway in explaining how he could have betrayed the public trust so badly—and pleasing to imagine, with Grossman, that he wasn't really talking about football with those protestors at the Lincoln Memorial on that cold night all those years ago. And as for conspiracy theory? Well, let Kissinger take you down the miles and miles of secret corridors at the Pentagon—not the 17 miles that we know of but the places underground where the nukes live, ready to put an end to the world way back in our bicentennial year, "the final one of the American Republic." A worthy pop-cult amusement, if sometimes reading like cutting-room-floor Stephen King mixed up with a little Boris and Natasha.

Kirkus Reviews