An anthropologist and his daughter travel to Kermunkachunk, the capital of Chalazia, to conduct research for an ethnography on the Chalazian Mafia Faction (a splinter group of the Chalazian Children’s Theater). The book takes place over the course of a night at the Bar Pulpo, Kermunkachunk’s #1 spoken-word karaoke bar. Moreover, it’s Thursday, “Father/Daughter Nite,” when the bar is frequented by actual fathers and daughters as well as couples cosplaying fathers and daughters. Somehow emanating from the letters on an optometrist’s eye chart, from karaoke screens in the bar, and from posters on a piazza that’s the scene of phantasmagorical and unending mob wars, Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit relentlessly pulls the rug out from under itself, leaving you suspended in a state of perpetual exhilaration. Leyner, one of the most blazingly imaginative and influential writers of the last thirty years, has not only written his funniest novel, he’s broken through to something entirely unprecedented. Imagine tripping on a hallucinogen made by an alien intelligence and then wanting to immediately call your dad (in this world or the next) and tell him that you love him-that’s what reading Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit is like. It’s a novel about the deep pleasures of reading and drinking, the tumultuous reign of a cabal of mystic mobsters, and, of course, the transcendent love of a father for his daughter. Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit is like nothing else you’ve ever read before.
