The Wilderness
113 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paperback
Release Date:01 Aug 2000
ISBN:9781573660877
A novel that works on our nerves, The Wilderness examines human flesh in all its gruesome fascination: disease, madness, hunger, the taste of flies in the mouth. By day, the story describes the winding streets, filth and poverty of the Indian coastal town of Cochin, as seen from the carriage of a three-wheeled trishaw—the ring of its bell a lament and a warning. By night, it follows the crooked path of the dead cart, collecting the deceased or the nearly deceased. Its narrator creeps through the halls of a whorehouse, catching sight of himself in a mirror—pale, fearful. Death, the narcissist.
D.N. Stuefloten has spent most of his life wandering around the world writing his strange novels and stories. He has been a black market money-changer in Ceylon, a smuggler in India, a dynamiter in Australia, a fisherman in the South Seas, a magician's assistant in Africa. He was once smuggled into Borneo by Moro pirates--their outrigger canoe had three outboard engines in back, and a machine gun in front--and has lived clandestinely in the Mayan ruins of Yaxchilan and Palenque. He currently lives in a small town in southern California with his wife, the Mexican poet and ceramic artist Jacqueline Lizarraga de Stuefloten.
