Curse the Names

One of Deckled Edge Books's "5 Books With Diverse Perspectives You Can Read Today" "In this unsettling mix of noir and paranormal obsession . . . Arellano displays a sly, Hitchcockian touch."

--Publishers Weekly "Arellano pulls off the not-inconsiderable feat of making the disintegration of his hero more compelling than the end of the world as we know it."

--Kirkus Reviews ." . . N]othing in New Mexico has ever been more secret than Los Alamos, the Atomic City, where a diverse group of geniuses built the first atomic bombs and changed the face of the world forever. That's the setting and premise for this excellent novel by Cuban-American Robert Arellano. Disaster is about to happen and one man can avert it . . . maybe."

--Globe and Mail (Canada) "Arellano's taut prose is] a trip into the mind of a man on the edge of delirium, piecing together a puzzle at the expense of his marriage and his sanity."

--AARP "Arellano writes with pure movement and action . . . Curse the Names does exactly what Hitchcock and The Twilight Zone did so well. It takes the ordinary, the benign and relatable and turns it into a fast-paced romp with unexpected events and realizations at every turn. Don't be surprised if you start this book and don't look up again until you're finished. Though its release has come at the doorstep of 2012, Arellano has definitely earned a late addition to my best books of 2011."

--Ryan W. Bradley, The Nervous Breakdown "Readers, fasten your seat belts for this one. Arellano's novel is a dizzying Thompsonian concoction of noir crime thriller and alternately nightmarish and comic surreal psychodrama, spiced up with a heaping handful of local northern New Mexico flavor."

--Albuquerque Journal "The nightmare intensity to Arellano's prose gets under your skin. You won't want to turn the lights out after reading it."

--Charles Ardai, Edgar Award winner High on a mesa in the mountains of New Mexico, a small town hides a dreadful secret. On a morning very soon there will be an accident that triggers a terrible chain reaction, and the world we know will be wiped out. James Oberhelm, a reporter at Los Alamos National Laboratory, already sees the devastation, like the skin torn off a moment that is yet to be. He believes he can prevent an apocalypse, but first James must escape the devices of a sensuous young blood tech, a lecherous old hippie, a predator in a waking nightmare, and a forsaken adobe house high away in the Sangre de Cristo mountains whose dark history entwines them all. A massive bomb is ticking beneath the sands of the Southwest, and time is running out to send a warning. James has to find a way to pass along the message--even if it ruins him.