Benjamin Whitmer was born in 1972 and raised on back-to-the-land communes and counterculture enclaves ranging from Southern Ohio to Upstate New York. One of his earliest and happiest memories is of standing by the side of a country road with his mother, hitchhiking to parts unknown. Since then, he has been a factory grunt, a vacuum salesman, a convalescent, a high-school dropout, a semi-truck loader, an activist, a kitchen-table gunsmith, a squatter, a college professor, a dishwasher, a technical writer, and a petty thief. He has also published fiction and non-fiction in a number of magazines, anthologies, and essay collections. Pike is his first novel.
He lives with his wife and two children in Colorado, where he spends most of his free time trolling local histories and haunting the bookshops, blues bars, and firing ranges of ungentrified Denver. Right now, he’s probably sitting with a book in hand, staring out his window and dreaming of a tar paper shack somewhere in the Rockies, about fifty miles removed from his nearest neighbor.
Pike
SKU: 9781604860894
Author: Benjamin Whitmer
Publisher: PM Press/Switchblade
ISBN: 9781604860894
Published: 9/2010
Format: Paperback, ePub, PDF, mobi
Size: 5 x 8
Page count: 224
Subjects: Fiction, Thriller
Praise
“Without so much as a sideways glance towards gentility, Pike is one righteous mutherf**ker of a read. I move that we put Whitmer’s balls in a vise and keep slowly notching up the torque until he’s willing to divulge the secret of how he managed to hit such a perfect stride his first time out of the blocks.”
—Ward Churchill
“Benjamin Whitmer’s Pike captures the grime and the rage of my not-so fair city with disturbing precision. The words don’t just tell a story here, they scream, bleed, and burst into flames. Pike, like its eponymous main character, is a vicious punisher that doesn’t mince words or take prisoners, and no one walks away unscathed. This one’s going to haunt me for quite some time.”
—Nathan Singer
“This is what noir is, what it can be when it stops playing nice–blunt force drama stripped down to the bone, then made to dance across the page.”
—Stephen Graham Jones
Book Events
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Reviews
- Pike: A Review
- The Chieu Hoi Saloon: A Review
- Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! A SF Revu Review
- Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! in Briarpatch Magazine
- The Revolution Will Be Fictionalized: Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! in Tor
- Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! on City Book Review
- The Jook in The Denver Times
- Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail!: A Mystery Gazette Review
- My Current Publisher Crush Has Got to Be PM Press’s Switchblade Line
- Benjamin Whitmer’s Debut Novel Pike
- Pike One of 2010’s Best
- Pike: Best Book of the Year
- Spinetingler Falls for Pike
- Kick Him Honey: A Review of Pike
- Pike: A Crimespree Magazine Review
- Radical Noir: 26 Activist Crime Novels: Revolutionaries, Agitators, and Organizers in Crime Fiction
- Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail!: A Review
- Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! in Publishers Weekly
Interviews
- Interview with Ben Whitmer
- Dancing With Myself: Benjamin Whitmer Interviews Benjamin Whitmer
- Pike’s Peak an Interview with Benjamin Whitmer
- Benjamin Whitmer on The Crime of It All