Written in a Florida jail cell while awaiting sentencing for a fling with a 17-year-old tourist, Bigger Than Life at the Edge of the City recounts Gene Gregorits' tumultuous months following the publication of his debut novel Dog Days in 2012, and his subsequent brush with underground fame after being profiled by Lisa Carver in Vice magazine.
When his beloved Florida beach life crumbles under an avalanche of evictions, beatings, police harassment, drug-induced psychosis, and his own passionately self-destructive urges, he succumbs to the desperate enticements of a recently-divorced fan, and returns to New York City. He finds the city he once escaped now reduced to a "necropolis," a bland, bleak landscape haunted by hipster ghosts, psychic vampire literary agents, drug-hungry ghouls, orgy-fueled sex fiends, and a parading horde of Christmas shopping zombies.
It required a hallucinating writer and a language shattered into a thousand shards, reduced to the formidably dissonant harmonies of a great lyrical music, to recall and translate the death of the counterculture. This is the absurd yet poetic epic of "Gene Gregorits," his female companion, and his cat, all lost in the rubble and illusions of a dying world.
When I hit St. Pete Beach, when I hit my nocturnal stride in the brokedown hurricane streets of St. Pete Beach, I understood that it was indeed the exact moment I'd sought from the very beginning... the moment captured, sustained, a living Polaroid of the perfect afterlife, and I learned how to swim in it, I could coast in it, float in it, dissolve in it to the point of expiration, or pull back at the last second if I so chose. It was a place, a time, a way, to drift from concrete to cloudstuff, uninhibited, unassisted, and completely without pretense.
About the Author: Gene Gregorits was born in Enola, PA in 1976. From 1997 to 2004, he published Sex & Guts Magazine, an independent arts and culture journal. His subcultural essays and interviews were collected in the book Midnight Mavericks (FAB Press, 2007), while his prose writing has appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers, and literary anthologies.
In 2012 he founded Monastrell Books to self-publish his first novel, Dog Days, which became an underground phenomenon and garnered both attention and controversy. Subsequent works included Johnny Behind The Deuce (the remains of an aborted attempt to co-author with Lydia Lunch), Sex & Guts Anthology, Dog Days Volume Two, Hatchet Job: The Gene Gregorits Reader, Fishhook (a book comprised entirely of Facebook status updates), and Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas: The Untold Story (a long-form in-depth interview with producer Laila Nabulsi).
His novels have running themes of poverty, sexual deviance, trauma, mental illness, violence, multi-substance abuse, homelessness, and death. Early influences on his writing include Hubert Selby and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Much of his recent writing celebrates his beach life in Florida after escaping the soul-crushing urban blights of NYC, LA, Baltimore, and Detroit.
