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A mind-bending slice of pulp fiction, which takes a traditional noir story of detectives, toughs and femmes fatales and pushes it to the limits of our imagination.

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LONGLISTED FOR THE EDINBURGH FESTIVAL FIRST BOOK AWARD

In a hard-boiled city of crooks, grifts and rackets lurk a pair of toughs: Box and _____. They´re the kind of men capable of extracting apologies and reparations, of teaching you a chilling lesson. They seldom think twice, and ask very few questions.

Until one night over the poker table, they encounter a pulp writer with wild ideas and an unscrupulous private detective, leading them into what is either a classic mystery, a senseless maze of corpses, or an inextricable fever dream . . .

Drunk on cinematic and literary influence, Muscle is a slice of noir fiction in collapse, a ceaselessly imaginative story of violence, boredom and madness.

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Muscle unfolds like a series of Russian Dolls, each more Beckettian, winding and wonderful than the one before. Compelling enough to read in one gulping go. Daisy Johnson

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Alan Trotter is a writer based in Edinburgh. Muscle, his debut novel, was awarded the inaugural Sceptre Prize for a novel-in-progress.His short fiction has appeared in Somesuch Stories, Under the Influence, McSweeney´s Internet Tendency and elsewhere. In 2016 he collaborated with Editions at Play on the experimental digital story All This Rotting (´mesmerising´ - Big Issue, ´nauseating´ - Irish Times). He has a PhD in English Literature from the University of Glasgow - his dissertation concerned writers making unusual use of the form of the book.alantrotter.com

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