![]() ![]() Paul Trilby, Hynes's protagonist, is an ex-academic who began his fall in an earlier Hynes novel. Middle managers had offices along the inner wall with a view of the dying oak tree, and everybody else occupied the honeycomb of cubicles in between, where nearly every vertical surface was grown over as if by moss with stubbly gray fabric. The offices along the outer walls, with views of the parking lot and the river, were taken by senior managers. ![]() In the center of the square was a courtyard where a sun-blasted redwood deck surrounded an old live oak, which was fighting a losing battle with oak wilt. housed in a wide, low-ceilinged, underlit room in the shape of a hollow square. In his brand-new novel, Kings of Infinite Space, Hynes has broadened the object of his satire: it's in the workaday world of a government bureaucracy, in this case the Texas Department of General Services (TxDOGS, for short), an office. ![]() He has combined highbrow literary influences with wonderful popular ones like Buffy the Vampire Slayer in a way that is both very funny and genuinely weird. Of all the writers looking, sometimes desperately, for new ways to tell stories, Hynes is one of the most successful. James Hynes's two previous books, Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror and The Lecturer's Tale, both received a good deal of national attention for their blend of biting academic satire and sometimes chilling horror. ![]()
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