Michael Bible, Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City, Dark Sky Books, 2011.„This is your new favorite book. You will read it on highways and down in the sand of a deserted island. You will learn Michael Bible’s striking and gentle language, which booms and slithers like silver percussion, and ride elevators in the forest, this horse named Forever. You will use secret cameras for spying and come to know Cowboy Maloney and his Electric City and see single bolts of lightning touch the ground. You will know this book is not like anything. It’s a book of brightness and purpose. It’s a book that’s pure and liquid and fuel. This is your new favorite book. Get ready.“
„Michael Bible may have hit what a lot of us were trying, a singular new voice for CEO’s to slackers. He’s so open, so easy, so fluid, you’ll smile with joy turning every page.“ — Barry Hannah
„Did I read this or did I dream it? A sharp and elegant book, full of surprises and delights, about to burst with barely concealed emotion, but so placid to look at. Like a dream, it is written in a secret code, but it’s as easy to get into as a death cult. Getting out is another story. I promise you’ll read it again as soon as you’re done.“ — Jack Pendarvis
„In Michael Bible’s Maloney, every sentence contains beauty and tragedy with a directness that saves the language from pretense. Take, for example, this one: “I think she could be beautiful if she gave up the fear.” Even the cans of Coke are lovely here, rolling in the sand, picking up light from a day moon.“ — Mary Miller
„Electricity has a world-old & indeterminate history. If you’ve spent any time in Oxford, Missippi, the American founder of this phenomenon’s name ends with Faulkner rather than Franklin. Continue tracing this small Southern town’s linguistic lineage & you’re struck by Hannah, Ford, & a host of other names & talents, many of whom I am pleased to say are currently practicing, or rather: perfecting. One such is Michael Bible, whose first book, Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City, has, as of April 5th, become available from Dark Sky Books.
Maloney, described on site as “[a] dreamy novel of suspicious taste, lustful women and men in spurs,” conversely defies classification: the brief, pointed glimpses of the cowboy & his cohorts tie together in a way that belies any further title than story. & this story moves with a pace aptly characterized as frenetic if not for the steady, precise hand of Bible, who I am convinced is the only mind to see the succession of events coming. Cowboy Maloney is mostly a blur until midway through, when in a Ray-esque moment of soul-definition he bares his primary desire: I want action and gumption. A bright, quick life I can believe in. After, I feel like I know Maloney as much as I can. Maybe as much as he does. Maybe as much as anyone can know themselves or others. This work, this story speaks for the ride, the hell-of-a-good-time that can be made of the unknown.“ - Parker Tettleton
Excerpt:
Did I mention my hidden cameras? After her shower I admire the lace Mrs. Kelly puts on. She has taught me many things: art and literature, how a naked woman behaves when she thinks no one is watching.
Maloney, how are you?
Fine, Mrs. Kelly. And you?
Do you have your essay on Heart of Darkness?
Yes, I say. I remember her body in the bathtub from the night before.
Double spaced, she says. Very good.
***
There is an illness in this part of the country that makes happily married men get up and leave their houses. Sometimes they walk to the next town, forget who they are and start new families. Once, after a sledding accident, I saw a man dying in the waiting room. He got off the bus by himself with an awful head wound, blood down his face. There was a magazine with a tiger on the cover. He picked it up. He set it back down.
***
The horizon is neon. I think of my father, an old man when I knew him. He and I are the same person with the same memories. My mother is his mother and so on. I think of how he sailed the South China Sea. I am there with him. I wear his gunner hat and he wears my spurs. I am also my grandfather, a navigator on a huge steel bird in the second big war. And I am his grandfather, a coward Confederate submariner shot for desertion while trying to swim home.
Excerpt 2
Michael Bible: The Bowtie Miracle
Michael Bible, Gorilla Math, Greying Ghost Press #23excerpt:
fr. MEMORIAL DAY
A girl in a yellow dress twirled a small baton then blew her whistle
and the parade began. Two black fire trucks followed the girl, sirens
moaning. Next, on horseback rode twelve men with curling waxed
mustaches dressed in stiff crimson robes and blue powdered wigs.
Arabian satin with silver tassels draped the men's calico horses. Behind
them a drill team in wedding dresses started a maneuver, spinning rifles
with fixed bayonets high into the sun, moving their veils aside to catch
them. Behind the drill team nude chamber musicians played the 1812
overture. Then a long flatbed truck passed with schoolgirls reenacting
Normandy. The front hatch of their duck boat squeaked up and down
as the schoolgirls fell limp onto the sand, fake guns rattling, their
pigtails flapping out beneath their helmets. Then came the animals. A
small heard of buffalo painted white, lions and tigers pulling empty
Amish buggies, black children riding drugged elephants, a dozen
peacocks in full plumage roaming free.
