The Heap

October 21, 2019
Adams’s debut, set on a disaster site in a strange alternate present, is an incandescent, melancholy satire. Orville Anders toils daily on the site of the collapsed Los Verticalés—a massive skyscraper. Every evening, he calls his brother, Bernard, a resident of the former tower who is somehow still broadcasting the radio show he hosts from somewhere in the rubble. Meanwhile, the bureaucratic chairperson of the Committee for Better Life in CamperTown stymies Orville’s friend Lydia’s schemes to oversee the upcoming visit of Peter Thisbee, the eccentric entrepreneur behind Los Verticalés, and share her views. After Orville rejects the radio station’s proposal that he begin mentioning brand names during the brothers’ conversations and they remove the phones, the calls continue regardless—in his own voice with painfully obvious product placement. As Orville investigates who is impersonating him, he stumbles into a violent, absurd conspiracy while Lydia abruptly gets her wish only to be hindered by Thisbee’s handlers. Excerpts from an oral history of the prior residents’ surreal life inside the tower provide a whimsically dystopian background to the main madcap plot. Fans of Borges and other inventive but piercing stories will revel in this offbeat novel. Agent: Kent Wolf, the Friedrich Agency.

November 8, 2019

DEBUT Los Verticales once stood five hundred stories tall, so broad from top to bottom that its residents comprised two groups, those who could still see natural light through their apartment windows, and the rest who had to rely on images on UV screens, guaranteed to "re-create 92 percent of the window experience." When the building collapsed, its remains covered 20 acres of ground. Volunteers are digging it out now, searching for anything usable in the rubble. Orville's brother Bernard, a radio journalist, was inside when the building collapsed. He's still broadcasting. The show is a national hit. Orville calls in every night and talks with him. When he's approached by the radio station's parent company and asked to insert product brand names into conversation with his brother but refuses, Orville is shut off from any further communication with Bernard. Still, every night he hears his own voice talking to Bernard, promoting the same products he'd refused to pitch. Things get steadily more menacing. Interspersed throughout are chapters detailing the skewed environment in which the complex dwellers lived, with the world outside not looking much better. VERDICT Adams's debut is an effective, jolting dystopic novel that should appeal widely. [See Prepub Alert, 10/22/19.]--David Keymer, Cleveland

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2020
When the largest and most audacious housing project in history crashes to the ground, a new culture is born, for good or bad. Adams' debut novel is a dystopian nightmare that is metaphorical in nature but has a compelling story, a recognizable villain, and a few key characters whose personality traits make them interesting. The setting is Los Verticalés, a nearly 500-story architectural marvel of its time; or, to be more accurate, what's left of it after the unprecedented housing complex crashed to the ground under its own weight. What the salvage crew unaffectionately calls "the Heap" is nothing but an enormous pile of rubble punctuated by the occasional dead guy. Weirdly, there's a single survivor: DJ Bernard Anders, who mysteriously still has electricity and broadcasts regularly to a wide audience from somewhere in the rubble. Meanwhile, interstitial excerpts from a history of "the Vert" titled The Later Years give context to the monolith's rise and fall. The novel's story centers on the "Dig Hands," the poor souls recruited to shovel their way through the biggest recycling project in the world. The link to Bernard is his brother, Orville, digging relentlessly and carrying on nightly conversations with his brother over the radio. Orville's companions include Hans, the photographer who emotionally captures his subject, and Lydia, who is trying to work her way up the community's political structure. There are a couple of bad guys here--Hal Cornish, from the company that runs the radio station, wants Orville to converse with his trapped brother for the highest ratings, at any cost, while Peter Thisbee, the mogul who built the Vert in the first place, plays at redemption while working his own machinations to profit off his fallen monolith. It's distressing that we have so many bleak visions of the future these days but at least here people are given a chance to dig themselves out of the hole that the upper class made. A vision of the future that gives the working class a chance to get even.

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December 15, 2019
In a social experiment gone tragically wrong, the 500-story nontraditional housing structure known as Los Vertical�s rose in an unnamed desert, thrived, rearranged the time of day for its inhabitants, produced a sprawling yet cramped, self-sufficient environment, and destructively fell to earth. The call to clear up the Heap, as it was then renamed, was put out by the building's enigmatic creator, and a global effort rose in earnest due to the building's very own radio personality, Bernard Anders, who is still broadcasting live from deep within the rubble. Among the motley group of recovery workers is Bernard's brother, Orville, shoveling through the immense ruins to reunite with his trapped sibling. The cluttered yet routine-oriented world first novelist Adams describes surrounding the Heap recalls elaborate dystopian scenes found in Terry Gilliam films, while life in Los Vertical�s before its collapse is purportedly drawn from the sporadic records of the nostalgia-addled Displaced Travelers, who were not present for the fall. The structure's past and the Heap's story of brotherly connection present irresistibly clever commentary steeped in wit and secrets.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)