The Ace of Lightning

“History as fiction, fiction as history. . . . It's fascinating to see how successful Martin will be as he moves from one fictional riff to another, playing fiction off history and history off fiction in one humorous, absurd, and serious tale after another. Some riffs are off-key but this is an ambitious and original effort well worth checking out.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Stephen-Paul Martin is a longtime, masterful, postmodern storyteller, whose characters’ meditations often blend together with his narrators’ essay-like ruminations in unexpected, comic, recursive, explosive, and subtle ways. Delineating a sinister, deeply absurd world which has both annihilated the capacity for laughter and repeatedly, urgently demands it, The Ace of Lightning takes us inside historical necessity, where time is fluid and Martin’s comic imagination runs wonderfully rampant.”
—Mel Freilicher, author of The Encyclopedia of Rebels and The Unmaking of Americans: 7 Lives

“Welcome to the explosion/implosion of your mind. The world addressed in Stephen-Paul Martin’s fiction blandly offers itself as a seemingly reasonable reflection of our consensual social/identity formation: the news media polluted by babbling celebrity, electronic instantaneity, narcissism, stupefying wealth, crass display; late capitalism gone hog-wild scooping up and rendering (as in a slaughterhouse) the last remnants of Enlightenment humanity; maniacal laughter as the car plunges over the cliff; the shredding of history through time warps and aggressive stupidity. No escape. You are IT! Don’t read this book; it will read you!!! Stay in your hole.”
—Harry Polkinhorn, author of Raven and Analysis