The Bong-Ripping Brides of Count Drogado

Don’t let the campy title fool you. The steampunk novel “The Bong-Ripping Bridges of Count Drogado” is a serious work of literature. Author Dave K, like Edgar Allan Poe, hails from Baltimore, and like Poe he exhibits masterly tonal control, carefully choosing vocabulary and syntax to create a thoroughly convincing imaginary world in which sisters with multiple eyes and a predilection for cannabis conduct an eternal bacchanal. His squalid tale is written in a clipped second-person voice, allowing you — You — to fully inhabit the narrator’s (mis)adventures. Bad things happen frequently. And somehow it all seems refreshingly good.