With Death Laughing

(Paperback)

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Description

The newest addition to Peter Plate's "Mission District" novels. "I'm an ordained priest and professional donations solicitor. I work downtown where I bang a tambourine and beg for money in the mellifluous singsong voice beloved by children worldwide- help the needy, give to the poor, amen." It's another hot Christmas in San Francisco as Peter Plate's latest protagonist sits on sticky concrete in his priest robes, avoiding the gaze of trigger-happy cops, and begs from the already struggling and poor. Never earning enough for himself or to send to his employers at Blessed World Evangelical Church, Father, as everyone calls him, shuffles to his $10-a-night hotel at the end of the "workday" to an empty fridge, moldy carpet, and nightmares of long-dead family and a long-gone ex wife. His only solace comes from his interactions with Sugar Child, a Prolixin shuffling woman from the halfway house next to the hotel, and the children who never judge him, but cling to him with their hopes and dreams of a better tomorrow. "Pain is a symphony. There's the pain that hums. The pain that groans. And the pain that sings. The pain that throbs has rhythm. The pain that sings, you sing with it." And sing with it he does as he yearns to help others in ways he can't even help himself.

Reviews

"There are two characters at the heart of Peter Plate'sWith Death Laughing. One is a just-sprung ex con turned bell-ringing street priest. The other is an elusivehalfway house diva named Sugar Child who is forever jacked up on psyche meds. We are at first tempted to write them off as a pair of losers. But as Plate takes them through the slow--motion train wreck of their struggle to live, to love, to aspire, to matter, in a world too otherwise occupied to care, he ultimately reveals their humanity.With Death Laughingisa crime novel in which writing anyone off is, in itself, the crime."LeeStringer, author ofGrandCentralWinter,Sleepaway Schooland, with Kurt Vonnegut,Like Shaking Hands with God

Like a nightstick upside your skull, Peter Plates prose makes the stars explode behind your eyeswith his deft streetcornerdelivery.Gary Phillips,The Be-Bop Barbarians

Plate is to San Francisco what Hubert Selby Jr. is to New York: a gritty, honest speaker for the grimy masses. Willamette Week

[Peter Plates] San Francisco is a fiery hell, where the devil rids in a squad car, and God doesnt deign to put in an appearance. San Francisco Chronicle

Author Bio

Named Literary Laureate of San Francisco in 2004, PETER PLATE taught himself to write fiction during eight years spent squatting in abandoned buildings. He is the author of many novels, beginning with Black Wheel of Anger (1990) and continuing through his seven neo-noir "psychic histories" of San Francisco, where he still lives and writes today.