Signs, by Massoud Hayoun

Prose, chapbook, 52 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Signs, Massoud Hayoun’s debut fiction chapbook, is a psychological thriller that follows intrepid investigative journalist Sam into the bowels of Los Angeles’ Carlyle Hotel, notorious for a string of mysterious deaths spanning decades. Armed with his wits and what he describes as the special occult power of his witchy matriarchs, Sam comes up against foes much bigger and badder than he imagined when he took an assignment for a viral trash news site.

Signs is an indictment of media sensationalism, settler colonialism, Eurocentrism in American literature, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, post-colonial dictatorships, the prevailing politic of gaslighting, and Los Angeles both as a temporal city and a capital of American soft power.

Massoud Hayoun is the author of When We Were Arabs (The New Press 2019), a decolonial memoir of his grandparents and political theory emanating from their lives. It won an Arab American Book Award and was an NPR best book of the year. He is also an award-winning investigative journalist.