Deep in the Catskill Mountains, one assumes bearded men sit in lonely cabins in front of log fires contemplating Huckleberry Finn and writing folk songs. Thus it’s a surprise to find one part of famed duo The Duke and the King (and The Felice Brothers), Simone Felice, writing an elegiac lament for a lost America against a soundtrack of eighties pop hits, beginning with Phil Collins and closing with the Eurythmics.

Lionel White is a Marine. Blinded by a bomb blast and plagued with nightmares of war, he returns with a new name – Black Jesus – and to a mother who has burned down their trailer-trash home and moved into a converted Dairy Queen with the local deputy. Meanwhile, a ballerina stripper who pinches her name – Gloria – from Laura Branigan’s disco hit, rides broken-legged on a ragged moped across the American highways, escaping her boyfriend, the music critic. Once these strands of the story converge we slowly understand the mystical magnetism that connects them. However to read this for plot alone is to do yourself an injustice. The beauty of the book lies in the depth of images, creating a hallucinatory experience and vividness that is as haunting as an apocalypse.

This isn’t Felice’s first venture into fiction, and it certainly stands up to descriptions of his work being a kind of fable-noir, but I think it better resembles his talent for writing songs. Motifs and themes are hammered home like nailed scraps of poetry to the wall. Between a mourning for a better place and the connection of spirit in the strange vortex of love, we are left wondering if perhaps this was all spoken by some burnt-out God. Like Rip Van Winkle, America wonders: where are we and how’d we get to this place?