The story begins

"Although Lyndon Augustus Zackheim believed with the seamless confidence of an old and deep faith that American veeks suck, he ignored the Mercedes SLK, the tasty little Beamer and the Saab 9-5 Sedan with that awesome turbocharged V-6, and headed straight for the odious one-ton Jimmy that had creamed a Windstar at the intersection of Heritage Lane and Yankee Doodle Road."

So begins Gift With Purchase, a parody of Cormac McCarthy's The Road written before The Road was even a gleam in Cormac McCarthy's eye. Set in the Mall of America and deep inside America's heartland, Gift With Purchase is a dark, mean and hilarious story of survival and love in the ruins.


A word from the author

"I dreamed the story one night in the year 2001. The next day I wrote a treatment of my dream, then flew from Montana to L.A. to register it with the Screen Writer's Guild. Over the next couple years I wrote a scene or two every week. When all the scenes were finished I arranged them in a pile, and began rewriting them as a novel. I don't know how other books are made, but to me this seemed like the right way to go."  [Contact the author]


Selected blurbs

"If it will acquaint me with the ingenious, unforgettable characters who inhabit Gift With Purchase, the apocalypse is not to be dreaded. Sain shows us that hope, love and humor will flourish where nothing else can grow. Maybe I should listen the next time my daughter tells me it's fun to hang out at the Mall."
—Jim Greenfield, author of Between The Lines

"If Hunter Thompson had been half the bad boy he believed he was, and if P.J. O'Rourke were half the provocateur he thinks he is, and they somehow became one person, and learned to write about ten times better than they ever have, they might be half as seditious and hilarious and blithely mean-spirited and accurate about this here land of ours as Ms. Elizabeth Mirabel Sain."
—Bryan Di Salvatore, author of A Clever Base-Ballist

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