Drug-runners threaten the West Coast!

A semi-conscious man looks about a boat's cabin as a woman presses a wet cloth to his forehead. She's young, her nails are short, and her small hands are calloused. When another man tries to enter, she grabs a gun: "If you come down here, Joe, I'll shoot you."

For a moment, the intruder doesn't move. "I don't want your damn' old hulk," he tells her. When the woman threatens a second time, he leaves. "You'd better too," he says. "She's near sunk."

So begins the story of Clint, a reform school runaway, and Devvy, an orphaned farm girl saddled with a deceitful drunk of a stepmother. Clint and Devvy are pushed together as they struggle against the corrupt, criminal, violent adults trying to exert control over their lives.

Perilous Passage first appeared in 1949 as a serial in the Saturday Evening Post. It has since been published in hardcover, paperback, and in Swedish translation. This Ricochet Books edition marks the first new edition since 1952.

Infinity Network completes Jim Johnstone's ambitious trilogy which began with Dog Ear (2014) and continued with The Chemical Life (2017). Central to each volume is the struggle with identity at a time of great social change. Justifiably acclaimed for his exquisite rendering of acute states of mind, Johnstone explores pressing questions about the ubiquity of surveillance and social media, and evokes, with a powerful intelligence, the neurosis of living in a consumerism-obsessed era. Infinity Network not only attempts to capture the changing ideas of personhood, but also tries to create a new kind of verse to track it—a complex, bold, stark style able to give uncanny interiority to our digital dreads. As our lives descend further into disinformation and algorithmic control, Johnstone has emerged as the laureate of, in Keats's words, truth "proved upon our pulses."