IN ONE L.A. MOTEL ROOM A COSMIC QUEST IS ABOUT TO BEGIN . . . More than just a writer more than just a science-fiction icon Benjamin J. Carp was a cultural revolutionary. Over the course of 44 novels and hundreds of short storiesincluding the counterculture classic The Man They Couldnt EraseCarp pushed the boundaries of literary respectability for the sci-fi genre and his readers perception of reality itself . . . until decades of amphetamine abuse and Southern California excess finally ended a mind-bending career that always just escaped mainstream success. He died in 1982.Until 2025 . . . when Benjamin J. Carp awakens alive in a burned-out motel on the fringes of Los Angeles. He remembers dying. He knows he shouldnt exist. Is he a dream? A robot? A ghost? A clone? A simulation? In his own time Carp pondered all of these scenarios through his fictionand now as he treks from Studio City to Venice Beach and onward into the paranoid sprawl of 21st-century Los Angeles he will be called to investigate his greatest mystery yet: himself. From Edgar Award nominee and Philip K. Dick Award winner Ben H. Winters (ECs Cruel Universe The Last Policeman trilogy) and rising star Leomacs (ECs Epitaphs from the Abyss Ghostlore) comes a uniquely fascinating and hilariously deranged excursion into the metatextual nexus where existence and oblivion past and future genius and madness and glitter and grim reality all meet just beyond Hollywood Boulevard.