Arnold Palmer has just died and The King of Video Poker is about to lose everything he loves.
In Paolo Iacovelli's debut novel, we follow a nameless narrator. He is a normative, upper-middle-class American who commutes to Las Vegas to play high-stakes video poker. He seems to have everything: a son, a loving wife, a beautiful home in Mesquite, Nevada.
But aimless and depressed, he must face emptiness in both spirit and body. His relationships deteriorate and our narrator is left attempting the deplorable to fill the void. He latches onto an excessive road trip as he fixates on Arnold Palmer's death, trying to chase a high that will never come. Falling deep into the throes of darkness, he finds himself planning one of the greatest atrocities the U.S. has ever seen.
"Iacovelli imbues the narrator's rants with an uncompromising precision; to him, Burberry perfume smells like 'rotten fruit tossed in a blender with noxious chemicals.' It's hard to look away from this disturbing character study" -Publishers Weekly
"A profound deep dive into the human condition and unnervingly emblematic of 21st Century America, Paolo Iacovelli's stunning debut novel explores the existential despair of a gambling man. The eventual loss of all whom he loves, along with his seemingly enviable life sends him on an impossible quest to fill the void that leads to a horrific, decidedly unexpected and yet inevitable, conclusion." -Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of Rabbits for Food
"In The King of Video Poker, Paolo Iacovelli's nameless narrator does for today's Las Vegas strip-in other words, America-what Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov did for Tsarist Saint Petersburg or Fassbinder's Franz Biberkopf for interbellum Berlin. Unlikeable narrators are difficult to pull off and often reveal more about their environment than themselves, but Iacovelli keeps us turning the pages into a neon emptiness that is as damning as it is dark." -Alexander Boldizar, author of The Man Who Saw Seconds
"Taut and full of menace, The King of Video Poker captures our particular American sickness with disturbing precision and dark momentum. Paolo Iacovelli has written a very promising debut." -Sam Lipsyte, author of Venus Drive and No One Left to Come Looking for You