Mortality Bridge

Dust jacket illustration by J. K. Potter

Decades ago a young rock & blues guitarist and junkie named Niko signed in blood on the dotted line and in return became the stuff of music legend. But when the love of his damned life grows mortally and mysteriously ill he realizes he’s lost more than he bargained for—and that wasn’t part of the Deal.

So Niko sets out on a harrowing journey from the streets of Los Angeles through the downtown subway tunnels and across the redlit plain of the most vividly realized Hell since Dante, to play the gig of his mortgaged life and win back the purloined soul of his lost love.

Mortality Bridge remixes Orpheus, Dante, Faust, the Crossroads legend, and more in a beautiful, brutal—and surprisingly funny—quest across a Hieronymous Bosch landscape of myth, music, and mayhem; and across an inner terrain of addiction, damnation, and redemption.

Limited: 750 signed numbered copies, bound in full cloth

From Publishers Weekly (Starred Review):
“Dark, grotesque, and eerie, Boyett’s behemoth reimagining of Orpheus’ descent into the Underworld blends Faust and Dante with Greek myth… Through unusual turns of phrase, violent and bloody imagery, heartrending introspection, and mythic tone, Boyett (Elegy Beach) explores themes of betrayal, redemption, and personal sacrifice in a tortured landscape of bedlam and pandemonium.”

From John Scalzi:
“Luminously tragic, darkly funny, and deeply moving, all in turns and sometimes all at once. Boyett is one of the very few writers who will make you eager to go into Hell, and not worry about whether you return.”

From Sci Fi Review:
“[Mortality Bridge is] for much of the story, a catalogue of the awful things to be found in this particular afterlife, which are so over-the-top awful that some of them exceed horror and enter the realm of farce… Does it end happily? That would be telling. I will say that it ends with a killer-diller final sentence. Again, the language is all. Mortality Bridge is, you should only excuse the expression, a Hell of a read.”

From SFRevu:
“Mortality Bridge has something for everyone: great characterization, vivid description, pulse pounding action scenes. But it is also more than the sum of its parts. It is a story of human weakness and redemption, a story that is even older than the myths that the novel draws upon, a story we can all relate to. This is an incredible, touching, exhilarating work, and one that I wholeheartedly recommend.”