The King of Video Poker
A Novel
Arnold Palmer has just died and The King of Video Poker is about to lose everything he loves. In Paolo Iacovelli's debut novel, we follow a nameless narrator. He is a normative, upper-middle-class American who commutes to Las Vegas to play high-stakes video poker. He seems to have everything: a son, a loving wife, a beautiful home in Mesquite, Nevada. But aimless and depressed, he must face emptiness in both spirit and body. His relationships deteriorate and our narrator is left attempting the deplorable to fill the void. He latches onto an excessive road trip as he fixates on Arnold Palmer's death, trying to chase a high that will never come. Falling deep into the throes of darkness, he finds himself planning one of the greatest atrocities the U.S. has ever seen.
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"In flat, anhedonic prose reminiscent of the fiction of Tao Lin, Mr. Iacovelli charts the narrator's shambling descent toward an act of unfathomable violence (. . .) pushing us to contemplate the motives of something we'd rather not think about, and to recognize the human impulses behind it, is one of literature's most valuable roles."
"If you don't know what this book is about, don't look it up, just read it—it's one of the most horrifyingly effective twists I've read in years. But even if you do, The King of Video Poker is a masterful character study, a thorough examination of the anhedonia and banality at the root of freelance American violence. Paolo Iacovelli is compassionate, menacing, and bleakly (BLEAKLY) funny—a writer you can bet on."
"Seismic stone cold stunner debut."
"The story made me want to kill myself, but I mean that in the best way it could possibly be meant."
"Taut and full of menace, The King of Video Poker captures our particular American sickness with disturbing precision and dark momentum."
"A profound deep dive into the human condition and unnervingly emblematic of 21st Century America."
"A mesmerizing account of one man's descent into nihilism, Paolo Iacovelli's The King of Video Poker is unlike any novel I've read before."
"…what Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov did for Tsarist Saint Petersburg or Fassbinder's Franz Biberkopf for interbellum Berlin."
"A bold undertaking and brilliantly executed."
"Iacovelli imbues the narrator's rants with an uncompromising precision; to him, Burberry perfume smells like 'rotten fruit tossed in a blender with noxious chemicals.'"