THE ABSOLUTION OF ROBERTO ACESTES LAING

“A haunting debut novel” —The Los Angeles Review of Books

“Excellent and nightmarish . . . Rombes’s novel is a love letter to this art of misremembering’: these destroyed films become as real as any film playing at a theater near you.”  —The Paris Review

“Beautifully composed, chillingly paced, and formed of descriptions of films you want desperately to see even if you know they might drive you mad. . .” —Full Stop

“Rombes smuggles the avant-garde into a novel that appears to be realist, to be conventional. . . The oddities of this novel, the ways that it breaks from meaning, often sneak up on you.” —American Book Review

“A novel—and a very welcome one at that—about the right to be forgotten and about the immense joys that impermanence can provide.” —The Brooklyn Rail

“A metaphysical layer cake.” —Diesel Book Store

“A strong contender for novel of the year.” —3:AM Magazine

“Rombes’s knowledge and caretaking of film history, as well as the strange feeling of imagining lost artworks by some of our greatest directors, makes this debut novel addictive reading.”  —Blake Butler, Vice

“I very much enjoyed this weird, disturbing, sometimes effe-ed up novel about strange films, lost films, and the fragile faith in the difference between our fictions and our realities.” —Jeff VanderMeer, author of The Southern Reach Trilogy

Interview (including the part about the knife fight . . .) at Weird Fiction Review.

Profile over at The Irish Times.

Thank you to Flavorwire for including Laing as one of the best indie books of 2014.

The second trailer for the Laing novel is up over at Vimeo.

Thank you to Glenn Kenny for his kind write-up about the novel, over here.  In part: “[a]n uncanny pleasure, a secret history in a series of alchemical celluloid prose poems. I enjoyed the hell out of it even as it began to conspire with my dreams.”

I’m in conversation at Electric Literature with Colin Winnette about Joan Didion’s novel Play It As It Lays (from which I nicked the name “Lang / Laing).

I’ve annotated a section of the novel at LitGenius.

At Necessary Fiction Steve Himmer kindly invited me to contribute to “Research Notes” for the novel, I write about two filmic influences: Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.