That Wild Music (COMING THIS SUMMER)
by D.M. Jamieson
A 0s&1s Original
Cover photograph: Cor by Celeste Adams
©2014

Sissel is a stranger in a strange land, a nameless northern metropolis in the late 1920s. He’s lost in the crowd and likes it that way, using his ambiguous appearance to pose alternatively as an Italian immigrant, a black slaughterhouse worker, and a white jazz aficionado. 

His steady states are sleep, getting high, and mastering the mystical art of gambling on the numbers—‘random’ digits printed in newspapers and racing journals. But when he finds himself pursued by multiple parties, Sissel is dragged into the city’s unfamiliar streets, which seem to shift and rearrange themselves around him: Two Louisiana thugs have orders to kidnap him and deliver his body for anatomization, an enormously tall Connecticut dandy is trying to stuff him in a bag, and an unorthodox rabbi needs his help to prepare for the end of the world.

Now there’s blood in the streets, and the city appears ready to crumble into nothing. Sissel is desperate for quietude once again, but the knot seems to be tightening around everyone involved.

That Wild Music is the debut novel of D.M. Jamieson. He currently lives in Toronto, ON.