The Year of the Lemming

About the Book

In the future all men will have become psychopathic killers and what few women survive will hide out in armed enclaves called safe houses.  Fran and her lover, Chloe, live in a big-city high-rise until it is overrun by “Teds.”  They take off on a cross-country odyssey across a ruined, corpse-strewn America, using their guns, knives and spiked-leather wristlets to fight their way out of one trap after another.

Meanwhile, another couple, Maureen and Paula, reside in a custom-built super house hidden in the woods of the Pacific Northwest.  As the number of Ted-sightings increases in the woods around their home, there is a growing strain in their relationship.  Maureen never misses a chance to demonstrate her superior strength and survival skills and insists on making Paula the centerpiece of her bizarre plan to repopulate the world with female children, which involves tranquilizing a Ted, strapping him to a table…

At the same time Nick, who considers himself an artist of murder, trolls the back roads of America, seeking out the most carefully concealed women and murdering them in elaborate rituals of poetry and perversion.  Twisted, devoid of mercy, he kills his way to an inevitable confrontration.

About the Author

Robert Smart was born in San Diego, California and raised in Seattle, Washington. He now resides in Camano Island, Washington. He studied acting, music theory, psychology and philosophy in college but has devoted the last ten years to the study of film and literature. Smart has been influenced by such diverse writers as Poe, Kafka, Musil and Bataille; he has also immersed himself in genre fiction: sci-fi, horror, mystery and suspense. In addition to his several novels Smart has written over a dozen screenplays for low budget exploitation films; screenplays with a radical psychosexual and political subtext. He has been trying unsuccessfully for over ten years to get these screenplays produced. He is currently trying to develop a no-budget video feature. In film, as well as in literature, Smart has been influenced by both high and “low” examples of the art, trying to create the perfect synthesis of drive-in and art film.