Pain Killers - by Jerry Stahl (Paperback)

From the Back Cover

Down-and-out ex-cop and not-quite-reformed addict Manny Rupert accepts an undercover job to find out if a California prison inmate is who he claims to be: Josef Mengele, aka the Angel of Death. Did the sadistic legend, whose Auschwitz crimes still horrify, fake his own death thirty years ago? Suddenly Manny finds himself in the middle of a conspiracy involving genocide, drugs, eugenics, human experiments, and America's secret history of collusion with the Nazis--all while careening from one extreme of apocalypse-adjacent reality to the other.

Not for the faint of heart, Jerry Stahl's Pain Killers hurtles readers into a disturbing, original, and alarmingly real world filled with some of the strangest sex, most horrific violence, and screaming wit ever found on the page.

Review Quotes

"PAIN KILLERS is a tale best read with a bottle of Scotch at hand. Author Jerry Stahl is perhaps the most visceral writer working in fiction; he's not afraid to look in the darkest passages of the American soul and report, verbatim, what he sees. This story -- of Nazis (Josef Mengele and those Americans who collaborated with Hitler's fiends), the U.S. prison system and love in a dangerous time -- coheres through his sheer will to bind the various story parts. It's often brilliant, always compelling." - Pittsburgh Tribune

"If you happen to have a deeply twisted sense of what's funny, Stahl will tickle." - Los Angeles Times

"From the opening gut punch this book had me laughing and turning pages. Jerry Stahl is Thomas Berger's wicked stepson and his new novel is a tour de force." - Tom Franklin, author of Smonk, Hell at the Breech, and Poachers

Stahl fires off great, if rude, one-liners while raising disturbing questions. - Kirkus Reviews

"Stahl is no stranger to smashing social taboos, and his trademark blend of ballsy, blacker-than-black humor and wry social commentary lets him find humor in the third Reich." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"[Jerry Stahl is] the new king of black humor." - New York Post

"Raw and devilishly raunchy." - Vanity Fair

"[Stahl's] brilliantly demented riffs beg to be read--or screamed--aloud." - Entertainment Weekly