The offices along the outer walls, with views of the parking lot and the river, were taken by senior managers. In the center of the square was a courtyard where a sun-blasted redwood deck surrounded an old live oak, which was fighting a losing battle with oak wilt. housed in a wide, low-ceilinged, underlit room in the shape of a hollow square. In his brand-new novel, Kings of Infinite Space, Hynes has broadened the object of his satire: it's in the workaday world of a government bureaucracy, in this case the Texas Department of General Services (TxDOGS, for short), an office. He has combined highbrow literary influences with wonderful popular ones like Buffy the Vampire Slayer in a way that is both very funny and genuinely weird. Of all the writers looking, sometimes desperately, for new ways to tell stories, Hynes is one of the most successful. (Apr.James Hynes's two previous books, Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror and The Lecturer's Tale, both received a good deal of national attention for their blend of biting academic satire and sometimes chilling horror. (2002), the same literate wit should have wide appeal. While the office may not be quite as juicy a subject for satire as the academic world skewered in the author's last novel, The Lecturer's Tale Amusing incidentals include the subversive sentences Paul pens for a textbook and the cat-related fare that is all Charlotte allows him to watch on TV. When the feckless Paul is put to the ultimate test, a Faustian bargain with zombies to surrender his soul and sacrifice Callie for a free ride at TxDoGS, readers will be on the edge of their seats wondering whether he'll do the right thing. The romance he strikes up with Callie, the appealingly goofy company 'mail girl,' provides the novel's emotional center. , 'Are we not men?' This is but the first of a series of uncanny incidents-a corpse in a cubicle no one appears to notice, a recycling bin that seems to have no bottom-that dog Paul at TxDoGS. One hot summer morning, stuck in traffic, he has an encounter with a peculiar homeless man who repeats a question from H.G.

An affair having destroyed his marriage and promising academic career, Paul now temps as a tech writer in the General Services Division of the Texas Department of General Services (TxDoGS) in the Austin-like city of Lamar. ), in this hilarious supernatural sendup of office life. Paul Trilby is still haunted by the ghost of Charlotte, the cat he drowned in 'Queen of the Jungle' (included in Hynes's 1997 story collection, Publish and Perish

Kings of Infinite Space by James Hynes