The Book
In a near-future Pacific Northwest city, an earthquake opens a tunnel to the land of the dead. The rich seize the territory below and extract rents from it. Aboveground, more and more people are driven into destitution. They survive on waxworm paste, trade fake currencies for fake lottery tickets, and entertain the rich with the spectacle of their poverty. Then someone or something begins killing homeless people.
Ulf Blank—old, gay, trans, and homeless—crosses these borderlands in search of his vanished top, the leftist Lojz Bristol. Hounded by a border patrol cop who wants to turn him into a snitch and drawn toward an ex-urban camp of communists, Ulf begins to see how his and Lojz’s private theater of cruelty may be intricated with larger systems of domination.
The Coward Ulf Blank makes the wager that capitalism deserves its own novels of disillusion.
Praise
“Ulf Blank’s trans cowardice in this post-dystopian after-after-life is eminently relatable, a surreally depressive tour de force that wallows as much as it sings . . . Bruno George brings a delicate and precise attention to the language of hope and despair, to have and have not, and to legibility in and of the underground. I savored every sentence.”Callum Angus, author of A Natural History of Transition: Stories
“The Coward Ulf Blank reads like what might happen if David Ohle, Antoine Volodine, and Ursula K. Le Guin collaborated on a detective novel. Eccentric and precise, smart and funny, engaged and absurd, this is a daring and satisfying novel.”Brian Evenson, author of Contagion, Last Days, and Phantom LimbORDER
Bruno George
Bruno George has published short fiction in Conjunctions, Birkensnake, Heat Wave, and elsewhere. He has a PhD in English literature from Brandeis, and he makes a living as a freelance editor in Seattle.
Launch Event
October 31, 2026 · 3:30 pm
Book Launch: Bruno George in conversation with Callum Angus
Cathy Hillenbrand Community Room
E John St & 10th Ave E, Seattle, WA 98102
KN95 or better mask required
Contact
Contact Bruno George at thecowardulfblank at gmail dot com
© 2026 Bruno George