Today, Castalia House is pleased to announce a debut novel by J. Mulrooney, AN EQUATION OF ALMOST INFINITE COMPLEXITY.
When the devil moves in next door to Cooper Smith Cooper’s house, Cooper doesn’t know what to make of him at first. But when the unexpectedly neighborly Scratch helps the unemployed actuary find a job at a local insurance company with the help of some inside information into the activities of Death, Cooper decides the old devil might not be so bad after all.
The only problem, Cooper thinks, is how to conceal from his fellow actuaries his newfound ability to perfectly predict the time and place of people’s deaths. And then, there is also the small matter of the screams of his recently deceased neighbor coming from Scratch’s basement furnace to consider.
AN EQUATION OF ALMOST INFINITE COMPLEXITY is a sardonically funny debut novel from J. Mulrooney.
This was one of the first novels I signed to Castalia House, and it has been nearly two years in the making. The genre is a little hard to describe, as it has fantasy elements, satirical elements, and literary elements. I would put it somewhere between The Missionaries and Loki’s Child; it’s not quite as funny as the former, not anywhere nearly as pedal-to-the-metal insane as the latter. It is intelligent, witty, and has a peculiar sensibility all its own; there is, perhaps, just a little John Irving maple syrup flavor to it.
Our production editor loved this one and says it is his favorite of all the novels we’ve published to date. Regardless, it certainly has one of the best first lines since Larry Correia’s first Monster Hunter novel.
When the devil moved in next door, Cooper Smith Cooper had the same question everyone else did: how would it affect the property values?