CROOKED
“Captivating”
“Clever . . . Nuanced, funny and moving . . . In Crooked, [Grossman] riffs on H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos in all its eldritch glory and creates an antihero as tormented as any Marvel or DC villain: Richard Nixon, 37th president of the United States.”
"A fiendishly entertaining book….The imaginative power Grossman deploys in Crooked is staggering"
“As outlandish as it is superbly conceived.”
"My name is Richard Milhous Nixon. I swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. I was educated at Whittier College in Whittier, California, and I have seen the devil walk."
Richard Milhous Nixon lived one of the most improbable lives of the twentieth century. Our 37th President’s political career spanned the buttoned-down fifties, the Mad Men sixties and the turbulent seventies. He faced down the Russians, the Chinese, and ultimately his own government. The man went from political mastermind to a national joke, sobbing in the Oval Office, leaving us with one burning question: how could he have lost it all?
Here for the first time is the true story told in his own words: the terrifying supernatural secret he stumbled on as a young man; the truth behind the Cold War; the truth behind the Watergate coverup. What if our nation’s worst president was really a pivotal figure caught in a desperate struggle between ordinary life and horrors from another reality? What if the man we call our worst president was, in truth, our greatest?
In Crooked, Nixon finally reveals the secret history of modern American politics as only Austin Grossman could reimagine it. Combining Lovecraftian suspense, international intrigue, Russian honey traps and a Presidential marriage whose secrets and battles of attrition were their own heroic saga, Grossman’s novel is a master work of alternative history, equal parts mesmerizing character study and nail-biting Faustian thriller.
READ THE FIRST CHAPTER HERE!
“Crooked confirms and details the extremely esoteric and occult presence we always suspected lay at the heart of the Nixon administration. It’s got spies and political intrigue and a sitting President spilling his own blood onto a pentagram hidden beneath the Oval Office rug, which is to say there are few of my buttons this book does not push.”
John Darnielle, author of Wolf in White Van
“In telling the secret story of Richard Nixon, Austin Grossman draws back the curtain on American history. Senator Joe McCarthy should have been much, much more frightened. Once I started reading Crooked, I couldn’t put it down. But be warned, even as you devour this book, it will devour you.”
Daniel O’Malley, author of The Rook