Trotsky works for a neuromarketing company that scans his brain to test new products. Only his name isn’t really Trotsky -- that’s a code name he’s forced to use. And the products aren’t real -- they’re hologram prototypes. Trapped in an increasingly unreal world that leaves him haunted by hallucinations, Trotsky goes to accident scenes at night in search of something genuine. Instead, he finds Holiday, a wannabe actress who fakes accidents for insurance settlements but who dreams of stardom. She leads him into an underground society of anti-corporate activists who live in a forgotten space in a mall. But when an encounter with a troubled cop turns deadly, the group is discovered by the media and dubbed the “Warhol Gang.” At first Holiday and Trotsky embrace their notoriety, but they’re forced to confront their own desires -- and differences -- when the gang takes on a life of its own and the body count rises.

The Warhol Gang is an absurdist tale for an age of absurdism, a black comedy for anyone who’s ever been trapped in an endless mall or fantasized about killing everyone in the office.

Peter Darbyshire is the author of Please, winner of the ReLit Award for best alternative novel of the year and the Ontario Arts Council’s K.M. Hunter Award for best new book. The Warhol Gang is Darbyshire’s second novel. He has lived in Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver. Visit him online at peterdarbyshire.com.

Peter Darbyshire's profile page

To the ranks of such transgressive, mind-screw masterpieces as George Bataille's The Story of An Eye, the fiction of Kathy Acker and the early novels of Chuck Pahlaniuk, one must now add The Warhol Gang....A brilliant, brutal evocation of contemporary life, less a satire than it is a warning....It's an exhilarating, disturbing, occasionally nauseating reading experience....One of the finest, and most important, Canadian novels in recent memory.
-- Robert Wiersema, Edmonton Journal

?One of the finest, and most important, Canadian novels in recent memory” — Edmonton Journal

?A violent, darkly comic satire of our media-saturated society” — Globe and Mail

?Puts the dead back in deadpan" — Montreal Gazette

?A nightmare that will linger for days” — Telegraph Journal

"Entertainingly bizarre futuristic tale of loneliness” — Winnipeg Free Press

?A disorienting (and chest-thumping) take on consumer culture” — Eye Weekly

"Denis Johnson stomping Chuck Palahniuk into William Gibson while Kurt Vonnegut cheers him on" — Bookninja

()