"Christian Franco, the creative and charismatic protagonist of Nelms's debut novel, is like an indefatigable class clown, darkly funny and constantly stirring the pot...a relatable modern man and Nelms' crackling prose moves like lightning."
Description
“One of the most compelling novels in recent memory” (Booklist) by a bright light in irreverent and compelling fiction: Joe Nelms, author of Formerly Fingerman.
Christian Franco is embracing the despair of divorce, doing nothing to slow the implosion of his career, friendships, and relationships. He camps out at bars to pick fights, finding that getting his ass kicked allows him his only meditative moments, something he explores with sardonic zeal.
Nine years of his childhood are entirely repressed, a consequence of his father killing his mother when Christian was eight. But as Christian is beaten to death in a bar brawl, his life flashes before his eyes and a long repressed memory resurfaces: the stoop of his childhood home, his father in the back of a cop car, and his mother being wheeled away on a gurney. Christian is resuscitated and comes alive with driving purpose. He must know more.
What follows is Christian's increasingly desperate attempts to kill himself, be revived, and slowly piece together snapshots from his childhood to understand this rediscovered self-knowledge and find how it can help him rebuild his life and marriage. Alternating between calculated suicide attempts and heartbreaking memories of a happier time, Christian revels in the underbelly of New York City in a spectacular downward spiral.
Nelms captures Christian's spectacular implosion in punchy, quotable prose, covering a Gotham from glossy Midtown offices to seedy Bronx dog fights. The Last Time I Died has the murky, teasing reality of Fight Club and the gleeful violence of American Psycho, but is entirely fresh, in a voice all its own.
Reviews
"Christian's rage-fueled quest to know the truth of his childhood comes in strobe-light snapshot chapters, flashes of manic action much like Chuck Palahniuk's transgressional narratives."
"The Last Time I Died falls in that same category Important Movies fall into, where you call it a film and it's deep and powerful and gut wrenching... You should read it, like you should read Eli Weisel's Night or Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave, like you should watch Schindler's List and Hotel Rwanda."
"Occasionally a book comes along that is so fresh and so different it just stands out. The Last Time I Died is one of those books."
