Paul sighed and peered ahead, where a homeless man was walking through the waves of heat between the lines of hulking trucks and SUVs, turning slowly from side to side as if he were lost in a parking lot looking for his car. In the heat, and in the rumble of idling engines, this sounded especially feeble. “You’re paying me as a typist,“ Paul said aloud, practicing, “but you’re working me as a technical writer.” Waiting for the light, the fingers of his left hand drumming the scalding side of his car, the skin of his forearm baking to leather in the heat, Paul felt less like a man who deserved more out of life than a peasant on a mule cart trapped in the middle of an armored division. The electric blues and greens of these enormous automobiles reflected the dazzling morning glare through Paul’s cracked and dirty windshield they radiated shimmering heat through his open window.

His fourteen-year-old Dodge Colt rattled in place in the middle of the Travis Street Bridge, hemmed in on all sides by bulbous, purring pickup trucks and gleaming sport utility vehicles with fat, black tires. He was steeling himself for a confrontation with his boss, screwing up his nerve to ask for a raise, but his present circumstances were conspiring against him. One brutally hot summer’s morning, Paul Trilby-ex-husband, temp typist, cat murderer-slouched sweating in his t-shirt on his way to work, waiting behind the wheel of his car for the longest red light in central Texas. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. Kings of Infinite Space is a hilarious and horrifying spoof on our everyday lives and gives true voice to the old adage, 'Work is Hell.' Mysterious men lurk about town, wearing thick glasses and pocket protectors. Strange sounds come from the air conditioning vents, the ceiling bulges, a body disappears.

For it is not until he begins a tentative romance with the office's sassy mail girl that he begins to notice things are truly wrong. And even here, in this land of carpeted partitions and cheap lighting fixtures, Paul cannot escape the curse his life has become. He's fallen from a top-notch university teaching job, to a textbook publisher, to, eventually, working as a temp writer for the Texas Department of General Services. If he were to be honest with himself, Paul Trilby would have to admit that he's having a bad life. 'Immensely witty.thoroughly entertaining.'- The Washington Post Book World

Kings of Infinite Space by James Hynes