The Guild of Saint Cooper

Following the ecological destruction of a futuristic version of Seattle, the city's inhabitants are forced to flee. An obscure author, who has stayed behind to care for his terminally ill mother, is drawn in by a mysterious group called "The Guild of Saint Cooper" who convince him to help salvage the city's future by rewriting its past. But the changes become greater than those he set out to make, and the city begins unspooling backward into its own alternate history — a world where giant rhododendrons begin springing up through the pavement, mysterious lights begin haunting the night sky, and Special Agent Dale Cooper might be the city's only hope for salvation.

Inspired by the works of Paul Auster, Haruki Murakami, and Robert Bolano, Shya Scanlon upsets expectations and conventions to explore the responsibility of the artist and the consequences of meddling with nature and history in his most wildly unpredictable work yet.

"Just when I thought I'd had my fill of dystopian novels, along comes the The Guild of Saint Cooper; a playful, imaginative, and wildly unpredictable ride through alternate Seattle. Scanlon delights in turning history on its ear in this daring and thoughtful high wire act of a novel." Jonathan Evison, author of West of Here and The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving

Shya Scanlon's The Guild of St. Cooper is about an obscure author in a near-future post-evacuation Seattle who is drawn into writing a revisionist history that sets the book itself unspooling backward into its own alternate history and into a world — featuring giant rhododendrons, space aliens, and a certain Special Agent Dale Cooper — increasingly both familiar and unrecognizable.

Shya Scanlon is the author of the novels Border Run and Forecast, and the poetry collection In This Alone Impulse. An editor at The Nervous Breakdown and co-founder of Monkey Bicycle, he won the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction at Brown University, where he received his MFA. He lives in New York.