The Appetite Factory

by Jon Gingerich

Overview

An all-too-familiar dystopia where public perception precedes reality and our identities are defined by what we consume.

As head of the crisis management team at a Madison Avenue PR firm, Leonard Lundell spends his days counseling executives whose reputations have been ruined by scandal. But Leonard has been managing a strange and debilitating crisis of his own that’s held him captive his entire adult life: Leonard likes to eat soap, pencils, paint chips—anything with no nutritional value.

For years, he’s kept his compulsion hidden behind a professional veneer. But when he signs an important client, an antisocial file clerk unwittingly discovers Leonard’s secret and blackmails him into accommodating her own bizarre culinary indulgences. 

A picaresque set against the backdrop of Madison Avenue’s marketing machine in the months leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, The Appetite Factory examines the earliest days of our post-truth era, where a scandal-obsessed news cycle and social media’s rise as an information platform have given birth to a culture addicted to recreational outrage and hell-bent on finding the next public figure to disgrace to keep ourselves entertained. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781684428694
Publisher:	Turner Publishing Company
Publication date:	08/23/2022
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jon Gingerich is a fiction instructor at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop in New York. Since 2006, he’s served as the editor of O’Dwyer’s magazine. His short stories have been published in The Saturday Evening Post, The Malahat Review, Pleiades, Grist, Stand, Oyez Review, The Helix, and others. Jon’s freelance writing regularly appears in trade and consumer magazines, as well as web outlets dedicated to politics, culture, and writing craft. He’s a graduate of The New School’s creative writing MFA program. He lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

The team left and Leonard closed the door. He found a can of air freshener and hosed down the chairs, retrieved a handheld vacuum from his closet and voided the area of its human crumbs, discarded hairs and castaway threads and dermal detritus, before returning to his desk. Tobacco sunlight slanted through the window as he made a half attempt to organize piles of paperwork, brochures modeling condominiums he’d been researching for his mother. Then he reached into his pocket and removed the bottle of soap he’d lifted from the hotel that morning. He thumbed open the cap, held its plastic nipple under his nose and drew in a warm profile. Citrus notes, bridle leather, the first breath of spring.

Sometimes he imagined what he’d say if they found out, if he was ever called to explain. The first taste made his tongue curl and resulted in a gag, because even after years of experience he couldn’t help it; no one could. As he continued draining the syrup into his mouth, bitter proofs began to rile his senses, tasked his palate with sour plastics, distant flavors of dried apricot and aged wood. By the second taste he was used to it, and then a strange and evocative warmth arrived, as though someone had told him a secret. He tilted his head back and drank the entire bottle this way, and there was an exhilarating rush, a roaring in his ears as he was plunged under impossible waves, drunk and helpless but safe somehow, cradled in great arms at a time before he’d been apprised of the world’s disappointments. He gagged again and grasped for water, which he threw down before surrendering in a grind of coughing and keening, as a single iridescent bubble that had traveled up from his gullet emerged at the gate of his mouth and popped on his bottom lip.

Editorial Reviews

An immaculately constructed transgressive thriller (fans of Palahniuk will rejoice) . . . The Appetite Factory was my favorite book of the year.” —Gabriel Hart, LitReactor

“The Appetite Factory is a brilliant satire that draws a bulls-eye on multiple targets—mindless consumption, outrage culture, corporate dystopia, the post-truth era—and then hits each one with deadly accuracy. The fact that it's so well-written on top of that elevates it to must-read status.” —Rob Hart, author of The Paradox Hotel

“Cautionary tale? Satire? An unflinching look at the ways we manipulate each other? All of the above. If Chuck Palahniuk and Irvine Welsh had a baby—after watching Mad Men, Swallow, and Secretary—it might look something like this.” —Richard Thomas, author of Spontaneous Human Combustion

“The Appetite Factory lays bare the cynicism of modern media damage control, where any disaster can be spun to someone’s advantage, and Jon Gingerich does it all with scalpel-sharp prose and searing wit.” —Craig Clevenger, author of The Contortionist's Handbook

From the Publisher