About this item
Highlights
- THE PRUMONT METHOD is a darkly funny story, capturing the wild last gasp of a family in retrograde against the backdrop of gun violence run amok in America.
- Author(s): Trevor J Houser
- 240 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Literary
Description
Book Synopsis
THE PRUMONT METHOD is a darkly funny story, capturing the wild last gasp of a family in retrograde against the backdrop of gun violence run amok in America.
Staring down the barrel of a crumbling career and imploding marriage, "math hobbyist" Roger Prumont, unwittingly creates a formula that might predict when and where the next mass shooting occurs. He hits the road (where he's joined by his unimpressed daughter) to test whether the Method could actually save lives. Except what if mass shootings are so ubiquitous now that his predictions are merely dumb luck? And what if he's risking his own life to find out?
Review Quotes
"...the prose is also stylish, with short sentences and unorthodox word choices. And it's interspersed with recipes for the obscure cocktails that Roger swills as he goes to dark places, despairing over whether it's all random and pointless, or wondering whether math can impose order over the mounting death tolls. Its final confrontation is well foreshadowed; still, it attains heartwrenching poignancy, even in its inevitability.
A novel filled with gallows humor that's representative of great creativity, The Prumont Method examines the phenomenon of gun massacres with pathos and profundity." -KIRKUS REVIEWS
"If a novel can be an animal, Trevor J. Houser's The Prumont Method is a Sphynx cat: a slick surface, a playful personality, a disquieting body, and a face from a nightmare....The rhetorical method of The Prumont Method is wildly engaging, entertaining us with dark humor in each bright seemingly disconnected piece while drawing us into the plot like the best potboiler. And the novel's Sphynx-like conundrums cut to the core of what it means to be a seeker of the rational in a violently irrational world." - Robert Fromberg
"...the prose is also stylish, with short sentences and unorthodox word choices. And it's interspersed with recipes for the obscure cocktails that Roger swills as he goes to dark places, despairing over whether it's all random and pointless, or wondering whether math can impose order over the mounting death tolls. Its final confrontation is well foreshadowed; still, it attains heartwrenching poignancy, even in its inevitability.
A novel filled with gallows humor that's representative of great creativity, The Prumont Method examines the phenomenon of gun massacres with pathos and profundity." - Joseph S. Pete, Foreword Reviews, starred
"This book is funny, sad, and weird in all the best ways. It's a unique take on our gun massacre culture-briskly paced and unflinchingly digging into big questions about heroism, helplessness, and holding it all together." - Tom McAllister, author of How to Be Safe
"Is it harder to predict the future or understand the past? Roger Prumont is many things-a tortured husband, a loving father, a failed marketer, an amateur bartender, an unorthodox mathematician-and The Prumont Method is a sad, lovely portrait of his struggle to make it all make sense. Read this book for its sideways humor and straight-on truth-telling." - Karl Iagnemma, author of On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction and The Expeditions
"Trevor J. Houser has the rare ability to deliver what very few authors can: a wholly unique, almost magical brand of storytelling that's the perfect blend of concision, humor, pathos, beauty, and utter irreverence. If Jenny Offill and Salinger had teamed up to write a novel about such a dark and rich premise, it would've been The Prumont Method." - Glenn Rockowitz, author of Rodeo in Joliet and Cotton Teeth