Buildings Without Murders

Our future is increasingly blurry and Dan Gutstein and his work may well be part of it.

--Cathy Wagner, author of Of Course



Dan Gutstein lives in the future and has returned from then to give you this book, now.

--Matthew Salesses, author of The Hundred Year Flood



A bookshelf without Dan Gutstein is like a building without murders—perfectly serviceable, but not as haunted as it could be. That’s why you should probably get Buildings Without Murders and put it on your bookshelf.

--Kathleen Rooney, author of Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk



Gutstein thinks questions are the answer, in a format full of unpleasant surprises, but he’s super into this randomization kind of thing.

--Terence Winch



Goooooooooooooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalllllllllllllllllllll!

--Rod Smith, author of Deed



Buildings Without Murders is lightning verbiage and wit, violence, love, and mourning in a wild future haunted by the crackle and hope of the God-booths, that singularly touching Gutstein response (or not) to the mortal coil.

--Patricia Saraffian Ward, author of Skinner Luce



Dan Gutstein’s last legitimate job was writing fortune cookie fortunes in a damp basement off Canal. A customer got one that said “You Could Be Eating Korean, (lucky number 43),” after which he began sleeping rough under the shrubbery.

--Chris Whittey (Dan’s former boss), Alan F. Rothschild Distinguished Chair of Art, Columbus State University







When the Civil Illumination Authority of an overbuilt American city solicits bids for a lucrative contract, the ensuing competitive efforts of one multinational corporation eventually unleash a morbid act of violence—one that affects a number of lives orbiting each other, including feisty redhead, LaRousse.



A young woman who charges ahead, provokes, and yields to tenderness, LaRousse negotiates the intellectual and physical spaces between her stormy father, Wiry Strength, her activist romantic partner, Vermont Values, and her dopey street-kid chums, Docile and Pockets.



The world of Buildings Without Murders subscribes, in part, to James Lovelock’s “Gaia hypothesis,” in that the earth is a living organism, and is trying to decipher how it might repair itself. Phenomena abound, including the ghost rockets, GPS pins, jazz holograms, and loose lightning.



En route to turning eighteen, LaRousse encounters the beguiling phenomenon of the God Booth Project, and her trips to this novelty attraction reverse a lifelong assumption in life-changing fashion.