The Only Criminal - Paperback

by Tim Lucas (Author)

Once upon a time, in a world otherwise much like our own, there is only one source of evil, torment and crime in the entire world. He is known as The Only Criminal.

By extension, he is also the only source of interesting information in print and televisual news. All movies, all TV shows, are made about him. He is also responsible for all the recorded music in the world, brought into being under the influence of illegal drugs.

The Only Criminal is also the only source of fascination for a brilliant young psychologist, Dr. Paul Vaguely - a man driven by his obsession with this one subject, which fills him with fear and fuels his boundless curiosity and imagination.

The good Dr. Vaguely is developing a new branch of psychiatric care, specializing in the treatment of patients whose lives were touched by the peril and plunder of The Only Criminal, but his plans are upset by two things: the discovery of the only known survivor of an Only Criminal attack to have actually seen him and lived; and The Only Criminal's most fiendish coup of all, which steers the world at large toward a collective nervous breakdown.

Decades in preparation, The Only Criminal is many things: a Kafkaesque comic book on the theme of Original Sin; a never-more-relevant love story between two isolated characters fearful of risking human contact; even a fanciful alternative history of how our world may have ended up in such a catastrophic mess. Dark, humorous, erotic and charged with danger, The Only Criminal may be its author's definitive journey into the depths of dark obsession.

"Compulsively, enviably superb. THE ONLY CRIMINAL is a marvel! Tim Lucas brilliantly weaves wit, romance and glorious wisdoms with maestro cool." - R.C. Matheson (Dystopia)

"It's brilliant... one of the most interesting and entertaining things I've read! - Kelley Jones, (Batman, The Sandman)

"This is a wonderful, droll, witty book-a real joy for people with eclectic cinematic and reading tastes. A bedtime book to savor, just like one of the hero's vanilla-flavored cigarettes." - Joan Hawkins (Cutting Edge: Art Horror & the Horrific Avant-Garde)