Beirut Hellfire Society: A Novel

"“Everyone loves Beirut and everyone is scared of Beirut,” muses a character in this playfully scabrous novel that draws nearly as much from Nabokov as from Lebanon’s grisly civil war in the 1970s. Beirut Hellfire Society follows the nihilistic son of a Christian undertaker who falls in with a carnivalesque assortment of gleeful scofflaws and kinky debauchees who take it upon themselves to bury the remains of gay people, heretics and other undesirables. The writing is bravura, the humor, stygian and the thrill of expression, triumphant – even over the blasted, blasphemous horror show of war."