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I Am Death: Two Novellas
In “I Am Death: Bartleby the Mobster,” muckraking journalist Jack finds himself increasingly over the edge when he agrees to ghostwrite the autobiography of a Chicago mob boss. In “Peasants,” publishing employee Walter Rasmussen discovers he’s the victim of sabotage by his coworkers — or is he? As in his stunning debut, Visigoth, Gary Amdahl here isolates his characters in crisis and flux, drawing out their deepest fears. With its vivid wordplay and blend of black humor and pathos, I Am Death demonstrates that Amdahl is a most adept and honest guide into the modern psyche of the American male.
216 pages, Paperback
First published May 28, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
August 29, 2022
Just over a month ago I began the menacingly funny yet somehow-poignant first novella in this book, "I Am Death," and got about 26 pages in before running through all the first person conjugations of the verb "to be" myself, then temporarily abandoning the book, along with all other reading (not to mention all other activities requiring any kind of effort whatsoever) while my body spent most of its days and nights trying to figure out just who or what was menacing it.
30 days of a 101.5F fever and 7 days of IV antibiotics later, this is the first book I returned to when reading finally and mercifully returned to me, and I devoured the thing as quickly as a slow reader whose lips involuntarily move as the eyes follow the bouncing ball of the text can possibly read, finishing the confident, always-swerving fading-mobsters meet faded-journo tale "I Am Death" relatively quickly before getting completely bowled over by and obessed with and immersed in the truly miraculous "Peasants" in the second two-thirds of this wonderfully inventive, constantly surprising book.
By "surprising" I mean BOTH on the sentence-by-sentence level as well as that of the plot: this reader was always more or less on edge, on a ledge, hedging his bets as to what would happen, or be said, next (the best possible state for any reader to be in IMHO). "Peasants" concerns the micro- and macro-aggressions that take place in the modern office setting in spite of (or perhaps because of) the ever-watchful traffick cops in HR. So much human potential (not to mention frailty), yoked to the profit margin and ever-beset by that ineluctable modality of the Org Chart, leads to much hilarity, and certain tragedy, as it happens. Just brilliant stuff and one of the best things I've read in a long, long, LONG while.
A Potential-Conflict-of-interest Klaxon sounds in my imagination as I type out the words MY VERY HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION (never remembering if there are two "Cs" in "recommendation" but never quite forgetting that there are two "Gs" in "bugger off" either), but not really: sure I have gotten to know the author a l'il bit (albeit on the Twitter) just before and whilst reading this book, but I never ever give a glowing review (or, usually, any review at all) to a book I didn't truly love. If you're not the kind of reader to trust the NYT, the Washington Post, the LA Times, or the Chicago Tribune (y'know, the dreaded "media"), please, at least this one time, trust mewhen I tell you, cos halle-bloody-lujah it's no longer just the Lyme disease talking here, but yer old more-or-less reliable, if virtual pal Dubyedee as well: Gary Amdahl is the real deal, my friends. Read him!
***********************
Some tidbits:
It was the kind of ridiculously far-fetched coincidence that you had to expect, after all, in what was in effect a small town, but find hard to believe in a work of fiction
Things, of course, had changed in America, but because those changes had been concurrent with Rasmussen's disappearance into middle age, he had not noticed them.
[At the Jimmy Buffet concert] everyone seemed to feel the same way—ashamed at the lengths to which they had gone to be amused—and had adopted the same method of coping—fraternity house levels of intoxication—but this kind of mass self-deceit seemed only to be undoing their ability to remain amused: there was a dangerous current of hostility running though every exchange of favourite song lyrics or bottle of Buffett Beer. In this way it was no different than a stock-car race or football game or election or war: one was there to support the ream; and the team in turn assuaged the superficial loneliness and underlying, almost infrastructural fear of metastasizing anomie that was the cross every white wealthy Christian had to bear, and that sometimes was used in place of a spine.
[The new boss] presented herself as an ambitious kindergarten teacher and revealed nothing of herself in conversation. She was very much a machine of the gods, Rasmussen suggested, asking his friends if he might be forgiven for turning the phrase around, raised up and set in place by a kind of invisible corporate crane to the large-gestured wailing and moaning of the chorus, who did not have the slightest idea what to say to her otherwise.
[Anita] had been trying to read what business school graduates were reading, the more popular and readable essays on management, and it turned out, she told Rasmussen, to be the same old shit: uniformity of product, minimal production costs, and market predictability. Rasmussen, in the course of a life of playwriting, bookselling, arts reviewing, and repeated failure to be extraordinary and unconstrained by reality in his pursuit of beauty and truth, had seen the learned playboys of publishing become Wal-Mart suppliers, had seen the festering corpse of Broadway reanimated by Mouseketeers running a protection racket, and philosophy become marketing, and so could think that he had fallen asleep only because he worked for a software manufacturer who was so successful he could run a press as he might a kennel of Lhasa apsos, as pets, because he liked the breed. We didn't have to make a profit, he told Anita, so we were free to be ridiculous.
"We published a couple good books," Anita reminded him.
"They can't take that away from us," Rasmussen agreed.
"Your days are numbered, though. You know that, don't you?"
"I see that they are numbered. I may choose not to accept the figure. "
"What are you going to do?"
"I don't know. "
"Content will be provided by offshore content providers and coded by trained coders so that it can be poured without spilling into a funnel on one side of our designers' computers, which will poop books out the other side. From a nozzle. They will be soft at first, but will harden into books." Anita began to cry and laugh at the same time in a kind of competition. "Oh, they hate me, they hate me, they just fucking hate me, Walter! They know I know how to do what they do, and how long it takes to do it, and they will never ever forgive me." She stopped suddenly and covered her mouth. Her eyes widened. "No," she said, "you know what it is? I am The Woman Who Knew Too Much. I am the only loose end of the perfect crime. They are going to have to kill me."
And finally, and most deliciously:
He was ashamed of himself. He knew the furnace in his brain—not the organ but the thinking—ran on fear, but what he was afraid of he could not say, Was he afraid to say? It was possible. Was he afraid to know? That was much more likely. If he knew, he would say so. He was not so afraid that he could not say what he knew. But could he know? Did he know? He could know if he wanted to, but he was afraid to know. Which meant he knew but was afraid to say. He was a coward of the worst sort: he could not face himself. It made just enough sense to sicken him, to make him feel like someone had a fist in his guts and was squeezing his diaphragm. Was he afraid of losing his job? It was contemptible to think so, and yet . . . had he not just said it? By saying it did he now not know it? Was his job contemptible, and his fearlessness demonstrated by his contempt for it? Or was he contemptible and his fear demonstrated by that very same contempt. Yes, it was certainly all childish and petty—but was not the childish negotiation of petty grievance the primary mode of behavior in the United States of America? Was it not the fundamental means of social and political intercourse? Were not the winners, the rulers, simply men and women who had grown up enough to manage the playground? Were not the losers and the ruled those who simply charged about the playground performing fuming little dramas—He said this and I said that and then he said something else and I smashed him to the ground—about the unfairness of life and the extraordinariness of the stories they had to tell?
30 days of a 101.5F fever and 7 days of IV antibiotics later, this is the first book I returned to when reading finally and mercifully returned to me, and I devoured the thing as quickly as a slow reader whose lips involuntarily move as the eyes follow the bouncing ball of the text can possibly read, finishing the confident, always-swerving fading-mobsters meet faded-journo tale "I Am Death" relatively quickly before getting completely bowled over by and obessed with and immersed in the truly miraculous "Peasants" in the second two-thirds of this wonderfully inventive, constantly surprising book.
By "surprising" I mean BOTH on the sentence-by-sentence level as well as that of the plot: this reader was always more or less on edge, on a ledge, hedging his bets as to what would happen, or be said, next (the best possible state for any reader to be in IMHO). "Peasants" concerns the micro- and macro-aggressions that take place in the modern office setting in spite of (or perhaps because of) the ever-watchful traffick cops in HR. So much human potential (not to mention frailty), yoked to the profit margin and ever-beset by that ineluctable modality of the Org Chart, leads to much hilarity, and certain tragedy, as it happens. Just brilliant stuff and one of the best things I've read in a long, long, LONG while.
A Potential-Conflict-of-interest Klaxon sounds in my imagination as I type out the words MY VERY HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION (never remembering if there are two "Cs" in "recommendation" but never quite forgetting that there are two "Gs" in "bugger off" either), but not really: sure I have gotten to know the author a l'il bit (albeit on the Twitter) just before and whilst reading this book, but I never ever give a glowing review (or, usually, any review at all) to a book I didn't truly love. If you're not the kind of reader to trust the NYT, the Washington Post, the LA Times, or the Chicago Tribune (y'know, the dreaded "media"), please, at least this one time, trust mewhen I tell you, cos halle-bloody-lujah it's no longer just the Lyme disease talking here, but yer old more-or-less reliable, if virtual pal Dubyedee as well: Gary Amdahl is the real deal, my friends. Read him!
***********************
Some tidbits:
It was the kind of ridiculously far-fetched coincidence that you had to expect, after all, in what was in effect a small town, but find hard to believe in a work of fiction
Things, of course, had changed in America, but because those changes had been concurrent with Rasmussen's disappearance into middle age, he had not noticed them.
[At the Jimmy Buffet concert] everyone seemed to feel the same way—ashamed at the lengths to which they had gone to be amused—and had adopted the same method of coping—fraternity house levels of intoxication—but this kind of mass self-deceit seemed only to be undoing their ability to remain amused: there was a dangerous current of hostility running though every exchange of favourite song lyrics or bottle of Buffett Beer. In this way it was no different than a stock-car race or football game or election or war: one was there to support the ream; and the team in turn assuaged the superficial loneliness and underlying, almost infrastructural fear of metastasizing anomie that was the cross every white wealthy Christian had to bear, and that sometimes was used in place of a spine.
[The new boss] presented herself as an ambitious kindergarten teacher and revealed nothing of herself in conversation. She was very much a machine of the gods, Rasmussen suggested, asking his friends if he might be forgiven for turning the phrase around, raised up and set in place by a kind of invisible corporate crane to the large-gestured wailing and moaning of the chorus, who did not have the slightest idea what to say to her otherwise.
[Anita] had been trying to read what business school graduates were reading, the more popular and readable essays on management, and it turned out, she told Rasmussen, to be the same old shit: uniformity of product, minimal production costs, and market predictability. Rasmussen, in the course of a life of playwriting, bookselling, arts reviewing, and repeated failure to be extraordinary and unconstrained by reality in his pursuit of beauty and truth, had seen the learned playboys of publishing become Wal-Mart suppliers, had seen the festering corpse of Broadway reanimated by Mouseketeers running a protection racket, and philosophy become marketing, and so could think that he had fallen asleep only because he worked for a software manufacturer who was so successful he could run a press as he might a kennel of Lhasa apsos, as pets, because he liked the breed. We didn't have to make a profit, he told Anita, so we were free to be ridiculous.
"We published a couple good books," Anita reminded him.
"They can't take that away from us," Rasmussen agreed.
"Your days are numbered, though. You know that, don't you?"
"I see that they are numbered. I may choose not to accept the figure. "
"What are you going to do?"
"I don't know. "
"Content will be provided by offshore content providers and coded by trained coders so that it can be poured without spilling into a funnel on one side of our designers' computers, which will poop books out the other side. From a nozzle. They will be soft at first, but will harden into books." Anita began to cry and laugh at the same time in a kind of competition. "Oh, they hate me, they hate me, they just fucking hate me, Walter! They know I know how to do what they do, and how long it takes to do it, and they will never ever forgive me." She stopped suddenly and covered her mouth. Her eyes widened. "No," she said, "you know what it is? I am The Woman Who Knew Too Much. I am the only loose end of the perfect crime. They are going to have to kill me."
And finally, and most deliciously:
He was ashamed of himself. He knew the furnace in his brain—not the organ but the thinking—ran on fear, but what he was afraid of he could not say, Was he afraid to say? It was possible. Was he afraid to know? That was much more likely. If he knew, he would say so. He was not so afraid that he could not say what he knew. But could he know? Did he know? He could know if he wanted to, but he was afraid to know. Which meant he knew but was afraid to say. He was a coward of the worst sort: he could not face himself. It made just enough sense to sicken him, to make him feel like someone had a fist in his guts and was squeezing his diaphragm. Was he afraid of losing his job? It was contemptible to think so, and yet . . . had he not just said it? By saying it did he now not know it? Was his job contemptible, and his fearlessness demonstrated by his contempt for it? Or was he contemptible and his fear demonstrated by that very same contempt. Yes, it was certainly all childish and petty—but was not the childish negotiation of petty grievance the primary mode of behavior in the United States of America? Was it not the fundamental means of social and political intercourse? Were not the winners, the rulers, simply men and women who had grown up enough to manage the playground? Were not the losers and the ruled those who simply charged about the playground performing fuming little dramas—He said this and I said that and then he said something else and I smashed him to the ground—about the unfairness of life and the extraordinariness of the stories they had to tell?
Read
November 24, 2023well this has me all messed up. big ol tortuous paragraphs about hidden motivations & tiny mannerisms w/ practically zilch in terms of sensory detail... but gripping?? makes me wonder if i should be reading henry james or something. wth
Currently reading
June 28, 2025The first novella has Chi-Town wise guys in it; I am on page 29.
6/27 - page 41
6/27 - page 41
Read
January 17, 2021I read the novella, I Am Death, in 2020 and I don't remember it well. I read it in the peak of being very distracted by current events (first few weeks of COVID-19 shutdown).
I began to read Peasants back then in that state and I just couldn't with my mind as scattered as it was. When I picked it up again, I feared that I would find that the story was at fault, not me, but luckily I found the story to be well constructed and quite a fascinating read.
Peasants is about an older man, set in an office. What I loved about it was this heavy foreboding weight that lingered with each line. About midway though I thought it might go in the direction of literal hell or purgatory, and though slightly disappointed that it did not, the sense of hell on earth was enough to sate me.
It was a unique reading experience. The text was slightly challenging for me, but the effect was worth it.
I began to read Peasants back then in that state and I just couldn't with my mind as scattered as it was. When I picked it up again, I feared that I would find that the story was at fault, not me, but luckily I found the story to be well constructed and quite a fascinating read.
Peasants is about an older man, set in an office. What I loved about it was this heavy foreboding weight that lingered with each line. About midway though I thought it might go in the direction of literal hell or purgatory, and though slightly disappointed that it did not, the sense of hell on earth was enough to sate me.
It was a unique reading experience. The text was slightly challenging for me, but the effect was worth it.
April 13, 2023
This is an approachable work by a writer so talented that as a reader, I worry I’ll miss the thrust. That worry was for naught. “I am Death” is a masterstroke of story telling at the hand of a linguistic genius.
Five stars - an easy recommendation for fans of literary fiction, memorable voices and unique narratives.
Five stars - an easy recommendation for fans of literary fiction, memorable voices and unique narratives.
July 4, 2024
Both novellas in this book just feel as through the author is rambling and putting any thoughts that pop onto their head on paper. There was no background in the first novella and no true depth relevant to the story. In the second novella there was some type of plot and a little background but not enough. The second novella would talk about a character and then boom drop them completely off the page, never to be heard from again. I picked this up as a quick read, but quickly found it to be chore to get through.
April 27, 2009
Another excellent book from Milkweed, I am Death by Gary Amdahl contains two separate novellas.
The title novella, I am Death, is about an investigative reporter who gets mixed up with a Chicago mafia boss who demands the reporter ghost write his biography.
Mr. Amdahl's is masterful at developing tone and voice. He evokes a chaotic, deadly world that sickens your stomach and reveals the thanatos lurking under the surface of modern American society. It is well worth buying.
The second novella, Peasants, is pretty good, too. :)
The title novella, I am Death, is about an investigative reporter who gets mixed up with a Chicago mafia boss who demands the reporter ghost write his biography.
Mr. Amdahl's is masterful at developing tone and voice. He evokes a chaotic, deadly world that sickens your stomach and reveals the thanatos lurking under the surface of modern American society. It is well worth buying.
The second novella, Peasants, is pretty good, too. :)
July 26, 2008
It has been said that the second of these two novellas PEASANTS is like "THE OFFICE meets Henry James." Fabulous writing, engaging milieu (high-toned, environmentally-engaged, publishing company), filled with intelligence, humor and anger.
February 27, 2009
Forthcoming... In the meantime, check out this "Coverminsation" with Gary Amdahl at Vermin on the Mount: www.vermin.blogs.com
April 16, 2017
I read the second of the two novellas--"Peasants"--and appreciated the articulate description of the petty actions and misunderstandings that slowly funneled a once productive business down the drain. Well done. I little foggy in the transitions between time periods and characters, but the fogginess is a reflection of the dense atmosphere inside the corporation. I will read "I am Death" eventually, but "Peasants" is the one I felt most curious about as there's a minor character in this novella I knew in the actual world, and I wanted to see how this person was depicted in Amdahl's work of (purported) fiction. In fact, the depiction of the person I knew is as far from fictional as one can get, and thus I wonder if the whole tale isn't called "fiction" but is actually a bit of narrative non-fiction.
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