Please note that this title is currently out of stock but is available for pre-order. While we don’t have an exact publishing date yet, it is expected to be available within approximately 4 to 6 weeks.
£9.99
When a bomb explodes beneath his bed, Samson O’Christ—a penniless philosophy graduate—finds himself catapulted from his quiet life in Cambridge, England, to a strange and dangerous world he never imagined. Awakening in Washington DC, battered and broken, Samson embarks on a bizarre mission to a town called Nothing Much in Areola County, sent by his wealthy and ruthless father to confront a blackmailing unknown half-brother’s mother.
But what follows is no ordinary quest. Tossed from buses, robbed, beaten, and left for dead, Samson navigates a surreal underbelly of eccentric outcasts—from gun-toting Jehovah’s Witnesses to a Danny DeVito lookalike peddling fake faces. Amid off-key opera and wild encounters, Samson’s journey becomes a twisted, darkly comic odyssey of alternative truths, missed opportunities, and unexpected revelations.
Michael Lawrence, acclaimed for his bold creativity and sharp wit, brings you a story that is as unpredictable as it is unforgettable. With the precision of a photographer, the nerve of a hustler, and the raw humour of one who has seen the carnivals behind the scenes, Lawrence invites you to step carefully into a world where the bizarre is just the beginning.
Dive into The Godawful Misfortunes of Samson O’Christ—a brilliant, darkly comic exploration of life’s strange turns and the roads we never dared take.
MICHAEL LAWRENCE has been a graphic designer, a London photographer hustling shots of pop stars and politicians in the carnivorous ‘60s, a printer with ink-stained hands, an antiques dealer pushing relics of dead empires, and a painter bent on chasing visions across canvas and screen. Somewhere in the wreckage he wrote forty-odd books for children and young people—stories strange enough to be smuggled into more than twenty languages and broadcast across the planet.
One of them, Young Dracula, mutated into a television beast that refused to die, running for years on the nation’s screens. He studied at the same art school as Freddie Mercury, Ronnie Wood, and Pete Townshend, but while they roared into stadiums, Lawrence slipped sideways into the back alleys of art and imagination, where the real hallucinations were waiting.
