Crooked
by Austin Grossman
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Pub Date Jul 28 2015 | Archive Date Aug 28 2015
Description
Richard Milhous Nixon lived one of the most improbable lives of the twentieth century. Our thirty-seventh president's political career spanned the button-down fifties, the Mad Men sixties, and the turbulent seventies. He faced down the Russians, the Chinese, and ultimately his own government. The man went from political mastermind to a national joke, sobbing in the Oval Office, leaving us with one burning question: how could he have lost it all?
Here for the first time is the tale told in his own words: the terrifying supernatural secret he stumbled upon as a young man, the truth behind the Cold War, and the truth behind the Watergate cover-up. What if our nation's worst president was actually a pivotal figure caught in a desperate struggle between ordinary life and horrors from another reality? What if the man we call our worst president was, in truth, our greatest?
In Crooked, Nixon finally reveals the secret history of modern American politics as only Austin Grossman could reimagine it. Combining Lovecraftian suspense, international intrigue, Russian honey traps, and a presidential marriage whose secrets and battles of attrition were their own heroic saga, Grossman's novel is a masterwork of alternative history, equal parts mesmerizing character study and nail-biting Faustian thriller.
Advance Praise
“Grossman out-nuts the nut-jobs with a premise that’s as outlandish as it is superbly conceived. . . . Crooked isn’t simply a work of simple satire or wonky alt-history; it’s a speculative character study that taps into truths about Nixon that may be more essential than literal. That is, when they’re not deliciously absurd.” —NPR
“A cantering hodgepodge of American history, black magic and political satire . . . Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Washington-style.” —Washington Post
“Captivating” —Entertainment Weekly
“Clever . . . Nuanced, funny and moving . . . In Crooked, [Grossman] riffs on H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos in all its eldritch glory and creates an antihero as tormented as any Marvel or DC villain: Richard Nixon, 37th president of the United States.” —Los Angeles Times
“Crooked confirms and details the extremely esoteric and occult presence we always suspected lay at the heart of the Nixon administration. It’s got spies and political intrigue and a sitting President spilling his own blood onto a pentagram hidden beneath the Oval Office rug, which is to say there are few of my buttons this book does not push.” —John Darnielle, author of Wolf in White Van
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780316198516 |
| PRICE | $26.00 (USD) |
Featured Reviews
Allen A, Media/Journalist
What if Richard Nixon was not our worst president, but our greatest?
That’s the question posed by Austin Grossman’s “Crooked”, a novel that offers an intriguing explanation for Nixon’s punchline of a political career. What if Richard Nixon had in fact stumbled upon the darkest of dark secrets buried between the lines of the United States Constitution? What if he discovered that the Cold War was about far more than a mere nuclear arms race, but rather the weaponization of occult and paranormal forces from beyond our dimension?
“Crooked” tells the story in Nixon’s own words. This Nixon was compromised early on, back when he was just a wet-behind-the-ears junior Congressman from California. In the course of his grandstanding attempt to demonize Alger Hiss as a Communist, Nixon’s desperate inquiries lead him to discover that Hiss was involved with far more than state secrets.
He crosses paths with Arkady and Tatiana, two Russian agents who have a surprisingly easy time turning Nixon to their cause. Nixon’s career rises and falls in unexpected ways; all the while, he is torn between his own selfish desires and his increasingly terrifying understanding of what the stakes truly are.
He ascends to the Senate. He’s chosen by Eisenhower as his vice president. He loses to JFK. He mounts his comeback in 1968. All of it serving as the public face of a private war being waged over the future of America’s soul. Through it all, Tricky Dick plods away, never knowing which side he has chosen … or which side he wants to choose.
Unsure who to trust and unable to be the hero that he wants to be, Nixon commits everything he can to trying to rouse America’s otherworldly defenses before the Soviets can unleash their militarized Lovecraftian horrors against democracy.
In this world, the United States Presidency is a position of power. Not just political power, either – the U.S. President has access to unimaginable mystic forces, though not all were able to access it. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower had it; Truman and JFK and LBJ did not.
Essentially, “Crooked” offers a secret history of Richard Nixon’s political career. It shows the motivations behind some of Nixon’s most well-known moments – the Hiss trials, the debate with Kennedy, his closeness to Kissinger, the Watergate debacle – as all connected to the many magical forces conspiring against both him and the United States.
The best alternative history is the kind whose wild fictions are built on a foundation of fact; Grossman provides just enough truth to make his story soar. The portrait he paints is of a striving, venal man thrust into circumstances he desperately wants, yet can’t possibly handle. The twists on recognizable figures – Eisenhower, Kissinger, Pat Nixon, Howard Hunt – are great fun for anyone intrigued by that period in our history.
One thing that should be noted is that “Crooked” is a wildly readable book – one whose fast pacing and idiosyncratic storytelling lead to an unending string of self-bargained “Just one more chapter” promises. It’s not every day that a book comes along that will entertain political junkies and speculative fiction fans alike; if you’re one or the other or both, “Crooked” is definitely for you.
