It's the year 2039, and Lake Michigan is mysteriously emptied of water. The planet's atmosphere and magnetic field are failing, and fires burn ominously throughout the empty lake bed. 

In this seemingly endless desert east of Chicago, three factions are locked in conflict: the original end-of-times cultist settlers who follow religious visionary Fulcrum Maneuvers and worship a giant World Worm they deem responsible for the drained lake; the megacorporation Quadrilateral, a mega-consumerist, planned-community combine of bourgeois city planners developing what is now called the Wildland-Urban Interface; and the Blackout Angels, landlocked punk pirates raised in Quadrilateral cities, who oppose everything and everyone. 

In Davis Schneiderman's shocking novel, Drain, freedom, creativity, and transgression wage war with forces of control, censorship, and conformity. The wordscapes of William S. Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon, the dystopic nightmares of Philip K. Dick, and the transgressive punch of Chuck Palahniuk and Georges Bataille together convene in this stunning and thrilling work.

Praise for Drain

"Drain is a post-American post-apocalyptic novel of excess, at once hilarious and brutal, with all the over-the-top energy and weird delight of a psychedelic cartoon. A mash-up of worm-worshipping cultists, a corporation committed to colonizing the deadland that used to be one of the Great Lakes with planned communities, and more, Schneiderman's latest warns us about what's next if we're not careful while creating an outrageous cultural critique that Bataille, Burroughs, and Acker would be proud of."

- Lance Olsen, author of Head in Flames

"Think the poetic stew/spew of an illegitimate son of Wm. Burroughs and K. Acker in a mid-21st century Midwest comix reverie of punk hoodlums as if ashioned by Elmore Leonard gone mad as Lear upon Mackinac Island, the great lakes likewise gone cloacal, the Post-American wind done gone wrong, and all of it a gleeful earful of eloquent Ballardian-cum-Bardic effluvia, and you've almost got what Schneiderman's fashioned in Drain; a headily obscene (in the root sense) tour de-literal- force beyond anything you can, or perhaps ought to, imagine, but which you will not forget."

- Michael Joyce, author of was: annales nomadique, a novel of internet

"Schneiderman has become a literary postmodern real-estate developer–slash–water-reclamation engineer from Mars."

- Cris Mazza, author of Trickle-Down Timeline and Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?

"Don't you dare blink. Not even once. There is no time to blink and there is
too much at stake with looking away or awry. Davis Schneiderman's prose is
lightning. Mad flashes of electric energy. I'm not even sure if this guy
actually writes sentences. I think he has invented something else to carry
his stories. No good old-fashioned sentence could possibly contain the
crazed linguistic feats and actions packed into every moment, every movement of Schneiderman's language. I was exhausted when I finished reading Drain. And perhaps even more so, I was unnerved. Schneiderman's narrative hijinx will change the way you think you think. Each sentence is a fit, a sputter of theoretical rage. I know something now, something that worries me and I am not sure what to do with this new way for knowing. I am not sure if I should thank Schneiderman or run for the hills. Schneiderman does what good writers must do: he tells riveting stories that change how we see into the world. His characters, his plots, twist us out of our comfortably numb rocking chairs and wake us up."

- Doug Rice, author of Blood of Mugwump and Skin Prayer

"Drain is the Clockwork Orange of our age, and anyone who cares about what we are becoming should read this book lest it become prophetic."

- Steve Tomasula, author of TOC: A New Media Novel