Christopher G. Moore
A Haunting Smile
Third in the Land of Smiles Trilogy
$17.95

Bullets are flying in Bangkok. Tuttle is upcountry when he hears Snow's BBC live report above the sound of M-16 fire direct from the urban battlefield near Sanam Luang. Tuttle, Snow, and Crosby return to HQ - the night-time meeting place on Sukhumvit Road where angels and devils, locals and foreigners, and the living and dead arrive after midnight to lease a few hours of pleasure, to offer up their dreams and desires, and to barter their souls for instant cash.

Through a collage of short stories, documentary films, radio reports, journals and letters, Christopher Moore reveals a host of ghosts, drifters, demimonde, arms dealers, journalists and the hardcore expats who have entered a world of massacres, wars, computer tank battles, and midnight secret executions. He creates a disturbing universe where neither the living nor the dead escape untouched or unmoved by the events of May 1992.

Heaven Lake Press (1999), 2nd ed., 320 pp.

 

“Courageous . . . someone to watch.”
—Peter Carey

“A Haunting Smile is disturbing. Moore jars the senses with discordant juxtapositions of his now familiar HQ, an all-night coffee shop where stereotypical ‘hardcore’ (read ‘cured of romance’) farang hang out, indulging in a never-ending cycle of alcohol and sex, with the shattering events of Rachadamnoen Avenue, and what! Virtual reality?”
—Bangkok Post