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Benjamin Whitmer was born in 1972 and raised on back-to-the-land communes and counterculture enclaves ranging from Southern Ohio to Upstate New York. One of his earliest and happiest memories is of standing by the side of a country road with his mother, hitchhiking to parts unknown. Since then, he has been a factory grunt, a vacuum salesman, a convalescent, a high-school dropout, a semi-truck loader, an activist, a kitchen-table gunsmith, a squatter, a college professor, a dishwasher, a technical writer, and a petty thief. He has also published fiction and non-fiction in a number of magazines, anthologies, and essay collections. Pike is his first novel.
He lives with his wife and two children in Colorado, where he spends most of his free time trolling local histories and haunting the bookshops, blues bars, and firing ranges of ungentrified Denver. Right now, he’s probably sitting with a book in hand, staring out his window and dreaming of a tar paper shack somewhere in the Rockies, about fifty miles removed from his nearest neighbor.
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Pike
By Benjamin Whitmer
ISBN: 978-1-60486-089-4
Published July 2010
Format: Paperback
Size: 5 by 8
Page count: 224 Pages
Subjects: Fiction, Thriller
$15.95
Douglas Pike is no longer the murderous hustler he was in his youth, but reforming hasn't made him much kinder. He's just living out his life in his Appalachian hometown, working odd jobs with his partner, Rory, hemming in his demons the best he can. And his best seems just good enough until his estranged daughter overdoses and he takes in his twelve-year-old granddaughter, Wendy.
Just as the two are beginning to forge a relationship, Derrick Kreiger, a dirty Cincinnati cop, starts to take an unhealthy interest in the girl. Pike and Rory head to Cincinnati to learn what they can about Derrick and the death of Pike’s daughter, and the three men circle, evenly matched predators in a human wilderness of junkie squats, roadhouse bars and homeless Vietnam vet encampments.
Praise:
“Without so much as a sideways glance towards gentility, Pike is one righteous mutherfucker of a read. I move that we put Whitmer’s balls in a vise and keep slowly notching up the torque until he’s willing to divulge the secret of how he managed to hit such a perfect stride his first time out of the blocks.”
--Ward Churchill
"Benjamin Whitmer’s Pike captures the grime and the rage of my not-so fair city with disturbing precision. The words don’t just tell a story here, they scream, bleed, and burst into flames. Pike, like its eponymous main character, is a vicious punisher that doesn’t mince words or take prisoners, and no one walks away unscathed. This one’s going to haunt me for quite some time."
--Nathan Singer
"This is what noir is, what it can be when it stops playing nice--blunt force drama stripped down to the bone, then made to dance across the page."
--Stephen Graham Jones
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- Pike Review - Spinetingler Magazine
Pike: A Review July 2010
One of the books that I’ve been looking forward to reading the most this year was Pike by Benjamin Whitmer...Pike may just be the best noir novel that we’ve seen in years, a true black novel if there ever was one. I won’t name names but much of the purported noir class of crime fiction just can’t hold a candle to what is on display here, Pike is hardcore and the real deal all others are pale imitators.
In a just world Pike will salt the Earth and reset the clock for noir in the 21st century, forcing others to re-examine what can be done with the form.
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