Scream Queens of the Dead Sea

Front Cover
Westview Press, Sep 29, 2005 - Fiction - 295 pages
When a young graduate of the Israeli army decides to moonlight as an assistant nurse at a mental hospital in Jerusalem, the job seems like a nice break from everyday life in the Promised Land. What could be easier than exercising power over a small group of heavily medicated zombies? But as the human inventory inside the insane asylum begins to mirror the psychotic norms of the outside world, the inexperienced ex-soldier finds himself trapped in a hilarious yet terrifying freak show, surrounded by a motley crew of mad patients gone madder: a religious poet who writes obsessive love sonnets to a Hollywood porn queen, an exhausted narcoleptic who refuses to go to sleep without proper pay, a living dead girl who claims she was raped by the Dharma Bums, a charming racist who wears only purple, an Arab who thinks that Robinson Crusoe was a Jew, and a criminally insane murderer who doesn't believe in anything, not even in nihilism.

Scream Queens of the Dead Sea is a fast and furious first novel saturated with ruminations on sexual aberration, heavy metal, structural linguistics, horror movies, and satanic poetry—the good things in life.

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About the author (2005)

Elbom studied English and Arabic at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He attended the graduate writing program at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.

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