Paul Trilby is having a bad day. If he were to be honest with himself, Paul Trilby would have to admit that he's having a bad life. His wife left him. Three subsequent girlfriends left him. He's fallen from a top-notch university teaching job, to a textbook publisher, to, eventually, working as a temp writer for the General Services Division of the Texas Department of General Services. And even here, in this land of carpeted partitions and fluorescent lighting, Paul cannot escape the curse his life has become. For it is not until he begins a tentative romance with the office's sassy mail girl that he begins to notice things are truly wrong. Strange sounds come from the air conditioning vents, the ceiling bulges, a body disappears. Mysterious men lurk about town, wearing thick glasses and jagged smiles... Kings of Infinite Space is a hilarious and horrifying spoof on our everyday lives and gives true voice to the old adage, "Work is Hell."
"Very few novels can manage to be both hilarious and creepy, but this one does. Fewer still can show off their smarts without slowing down the plot, but this one does that, too." -Laura Miller, Salon
"This macabre, funny, and very twisted satire of office life displays James Hynes as a wonderfully eccentric and entirely original writer." -Adrienne Miller, Esquire
"Immensely witty...A fast, funny ride through pretty peculiar territory." -Jonathan Yardley,The Washington Post Book World
"What makes this novel scarier—and more ambitious—than The Lecturer's Tale and Publish and Perish, Hynes's previous books, is that it isn't about the academy. It's about all of us—porters, waitresses, office schlubs and TV anchorwomen, as well as people who read The Norton Anthology of English Literature. They, we, are all trying to rise or at least not fall, haunted by the idea that someone—no matter where we are on the totem pole—is richer, more important, hipper, less humiliated than us." -The New York Times Book Review
"Hynes has mastered the art of luring, hooking, and reeling readers in with his salty style and quick wit...A refreshing escape from the typically mundane plots of commercial fiction." -USA Today
"Kings of Infinite Space is social satire that slides smoothly into horror." -Time
"People really do laugh out loud when reading Hynes novels...Funny, frightening, smart, and sexy! It is absolutely unlike anything you have ever read." -Keith Taylor, Ann Arbor Observer