A dazzling epic that follows two very different families in Cleveland across generations, beginning with their patriarchs, who become irrevocably intertwined one fateful night A blistering dark comedy, The Comedown is a romp across America, from the Kent State shootings to protest marches in Chicago to the Florida Everglades, that explores delineating lines of race, class, religion, and time. Scrappy, street-smart drug dealer Reggie Marshall has never liked the simpering addict Leland Bloom-Mittwoch, which doesn't stop Leland from looking up to Reggie with puppy-esque devotion. But when a drug deal goes dramatically, tragically wrong and a suitcase (which may or may not contain a quarter of a million dollars) disappears, the two men and their families become hopelessly entangled. It's a mistake that sets in motion a series of events that are odd, captivating, suspenseful, and ultimately inevitable. Both incendiary and earnest, The Comedown steadfastly catalogs the tangled messes the characters make of their lives, never losing sight of the beauty and power of each family member's capacity for love, be it for money, drugs, or each other.
Author
Rafael Frumkin's first novel, THE COMEDOWN, was published by Henry Holt in 2018. His second novel, CONFIDENCE, is forthcoming from Simon and Schuster in February 2023. His collection of short stories, BUGSY, is slated to hit shelves in early 2024. He has written for the Washington Post, the Paris Review, Granta, Guernica, Hazlitt, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency, among other places. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Medill School of Journalism, he lives in Carbondale, IL, where he teaches fiction and nonfiction writing at Southern Illinois University.
