Reflections of Fontaine

"I am the City."

Nicolas Fontaine is a Hitchcock-obsessed, down-on-his-luck cartoonist whose propensity for addiction's dug him a pathetic lifestyle of late-night television movies and sexual rendezvous with the city's slimiest. He's more than willing to answer when the fat man comes calling, with an offer: join a secret drug trial and make enough money to escape Paris forever.

Only, the magic pill-jazz-ain't nothing he's ever done before; it sends him to a strange parallel universe unlike Paris 1959, yet strikingly similar, a universe in which there lives a bizarre creature of alien making. For the fat man, the equation is simple: you kill the creature, you're free. But the creature senses the fat man's deception, promising something even greater: to be, at last, seen. So Nicolas finds himself in a bidding war for his soul, where the winner takes all, and if the fat man doesn't get what he wants, he'll erase all evidence that you were ever there at all.

That is if, of course, the City doesn't get you first.

Reflections of Fontaine is a slow yet twisted dive into the mind of a film-obsessed city loner, the newest novel from Brandon Young (author of "Nefarious Schemes to Murder Lady Midnight"). It's magical realism against the backdrop of a brutal winter in Paris -- sure to be one of the strangest books you read this year.