Mortality Bridge

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 red-lit 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. MORTALITY BRIDGE has won the 2011 Emperor Norton Award for Best Novel.