Mortality Bridge

Book excerpt: “Niko’s race through Hell is one of the greatest supernatural adventure stories of recent memory. . . . A damned good story” (Cory Doctorow). Decades ago, a young rock and blues guitarist and junkie named Niko signed in blood on the dotted line and in return became the stuff of music legend. But when the love of his damned life grows mortally and mysteriously ill, he realizes he has lost more than he bargained for—and that was not part of the deal. So Niko sets out on a harrowing journey from the streets of Los Angeles through the downtown subway tunnels and across the red-lit plain of the most vividly realized hell since Dante to play the gig of his mortgaged life and win back the purloined soul of his lost love. Mortality Bridge remixes Orpheus, Dante, Faust, the Crossroads legend, and more in a beautiful, brutal, and surprisingly funny quest across a Hieronymus Bosch landscape of myth, music, and mayhem, and across an inner terrain of addiction, damnation, and redemption. Winner of the 2011 Emperor Norton Award for best novel by a San Francisco Bay Area writer.