The Pure Cold Light on sale this week at Book View Cafe

My 1993 sf novel, The Pure Cold Light, is the special this week at Book View Cafe, where you’ll find the ebook available for just $.99.

“Gregory Frost’s dystopian adventure, [is] set in an unspecified future Philadelphia that has split in two. The rich and their servants live in the Overcity’s towers; the poor, addicted and disenfranchised nest in the Undercity, occupying derelict buildings, SEPTA catacombs and Box City, a sprawling morass of packing containers on Independence Mall. President Odie is a talk-show host and puppet of the world’s largest corporation, named (sans subtlety) ScumberCorp. They make the drug Orbitol, which has unexpected dimensional side effects, and infuse their Happy Burgers with masses-mollifying tranquilizers…. Frost’s predictions are all the more impressive given that his vision developed in the Internet’s nascent days — a decade and a half before Citizens United, seven years before Survivor and (arguably) before that blurry date when presidential candidates became media monkeys.” Mark Cofta, Philadelphia City Paper

The Pure Cold Light, a science fiction novel

In a future Philadelphia, the drug of choice on the streets will take you to another world…literally.

The Pure Cold LIght is reviewed

There is nothing weirder than getting a great review of a book that went out of print in 1994. (Okay, actually, it’s back these days in ebook format from Book View Cafe).

City Paper review of The Pure Cold Light

THE PURE COLD LIGHT returns

My 1993 Nebula-Award-nominated novel, The Pure Cold Light, has returned in .mobi and .epub formats at Book View Cafe at $4.99 for your Nook, Kindle, or iPad. (It’ll appear later at Amazon and B&N, but why not support an independent online genre-wide bookstore?) I was somewhat taken aback in prepping it for ebook format how weirdly prescient was some of what I thought to be pure dark satire. This adultscience fiction thriller set mostly in a near-future or alternate Hieronymus-Boschian Philadelphia garnered a fair bit of praise its first time around:

“The Pure Cold Light delivers all that a thriller junkie could ask for (and) sounds like horror or magical realism but Frost’s prose is closer to Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash—hip, tough, and funny.”

-SFRA Review #214

  “…read this one for it bizarre details, complex background, its extremity, and its humane sympathy for people caught up in a world where public betrayal is a daily fact and the best most can hope for is survival.”

-John Kessel, F&SF “Short Takes”

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“[Frost] takes us over familiar territory, but does it expertly, and the destination…is unexpected.”

-Aboriginal Science Fiction

 

“Author Gregory Frost imagines a nightmarish future where the world is run by a drug-pushing, media-managing, government-corrupting multinational corporation…far out even by science-fiction standards.”

-Philadelphia Inquirer