The Armageddon Mandala book arrives

The Armageddon Mandala
By Gopal Mukerjee
Publisher: Revenge Ink
RRP: 12.99, trade paperback
Pages: 575
Release: April 2009

The Armageddon Mandala is the debut novel by upcoming writer, Gopal Mukerjee and is published by Revenge Ink, a revolutionary, subversive publishing company that was launched to showcase cutting edge works. Written in first person, this comedic fantasy fiction is a sinister and eccentric tale of life and death proportions told through the voice of Allen Ginsberg, a loser PI who finds himself in the middle of a planetary holocaust.

Synopsis:
Self-declared private investigator, Allen Ginsberg, leads a life of sunlit ease in the sleepy town of Snowdrop. All that suddenly changes when a mysterious stranger, Gyani shows up in his office with a lucrative PI gig that Ginsberg can't refuse. What starts out as a small, but eccentric assignment quickly turns sour and Ginsberg soon finds himself trapped in a vortex of increasingly bizarre rituals and life-threatening ordeals that defy all reason and explanation. When Gyani hits Ginsberg with a revelation that "flips his life-world ass over tit", Ginsberg discovers that the fate of the world rests in his hands and nothing will ever be the same again.

Excerpt:
I didn't see him at first. What I saw was an image of the sun in total eclipse, a dark disc with a flaming corona. Then the image changed and a face appeared. Not a human face, no such luck. More like one of those extraterrestrial mugs you see in UFO movies. Here we go, I thought, another alien abduction. They're going to beam me up to the Mother Ship, stick probes in my favourite orifice and sap my dugs for their breeding program. I stared at that face a moment, my vision unfocused. Then I tipped back my hat, wiped drool off my chin, swung my feet off the desk and blinked. That's when I saw him clear: a stocky little guy, brown, stone bald, in a metal gray Nehru suit. A red rose showed at his breast pocket, his shoes gleaming black.

Casa Ginsberg appeared at left, picturesque as ever. The sight of it shoud've gladdened me, but it didn't. Not this time. All it did was remind me of Little Boy and the trouble I was in. I had a definite sense of foreboding now. Not just foreboding. I was past the 'fore'. This was pure, undisguised boding, a tangible augury of doom.


About the author:
Gopal Mukerjee is a writer, imagist and provocateur of Indian origin. He was born in Mumbai and has lived in India, Britain and the United States. As a writer of novels and screenplays, Gopal favours the lurid, the hypertrophic and the Rabelaisian. He has a penchant for cult narratives that resemble drug-addled nightmares and surreal mind-trips

About Revenge Ink:
Revenge Ink is a revolutionary new publishing company that launched to challenge the conventions of the mainstream, highbrow publishing industry by showcasing cutting-edge works from subversive new writers. Dynamic siblings Amita and Gopal Mukerjee founded Revenge Ink to promote strong voices and take on emotionally driven and inspiring projects to encourage edgy 'outside-the-box' thinking.

www.revengeink.com