Alex Park

Running from the Paranoids Alex Park

Paranoids is the decidedly different love story of some quirky characters in NYC. Igor Prince is the son of a German industrialist listlessly wasting his life to the benign horror of his father, while trying to devise a scheme of life that parallels many of Pushkin's stories, in Igor's own Theory of Imaginative Logic, which in turn follows the physicist Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. None of this, of course, makes much sense, but he is running from it all the same, just at a very slow pace. Igor's dead mother's associate Lazlo, an old Finish war hero, raised him and traveled with them in Thailand, Brazil, and Sri Lanka. Igor's girlfriend has left him for another woman in a bad reaction to his scheme, then he meets an actress, Allyson, also a bit unusual, through a phone sex line. From her his life gains purpose when she steals the stories he has been writing, The Pan-Galactic Amusement Park, and publishes them as successful novel. Their odyssey ends sailing across the Atlantic with some friends to finish Lazlo's legacy. Shades of Vonnegut, David Foster Wallace, but anything that does happen in Running from the Paranoids could happen.