Benjamin HC Solicit

 

 

What happens when we die? Is it the end? Or is death a doorway to a new beginning? 

When Benjamin awakens in a motel room, he cannot remember how he got there. The manager attaches little cosmic significance to someone slipping into a room like a stowaway on the ship of life. But when the clerk sees the man raving about people speaking into Psy-Tac Intercommunicators, his thoughts drift back to his father's favorite author. 

Marcus is an easygoing guy. He's sufficient intrigued to take the stranger under his wing. But did the man write all the science fiction novels his father collected? And if so, how did Benjamin J Carp return from dead?

Here's all the info from Oni Press:

 

BENJAMIN HC

WRITTEN BY BEN H. WINTERS ART BY LEOMACS COVER BY CHRISTIAN WARD IN ONE L.A. MOTEL ROOM, A COSMIC QUEST IS ABOUT TO BEGIN . . . More than just a writer, more than just a science-fiction icon, Benjamin J. Carp was a cultural revolutionary. Over the course of 44 novels and hundreds of short stories—including the counterculture classic The Man They Couldn’t Erase—Carp pushed the boundaries of literary respectability for the sci-fi genre and his readers’ perception of reality itself . . . until decades of amphetamine abuse and Southern California excess finally ended a mind-bending career that always just escaped mainstream success. He died in 1982. Until 2025 . . . when Benjamin J. Carp awakens, alive, in a burned-out motel on the fringes of Los Angeles. He remembers dying. He knows he shouldn’t exist. Is he a dream? A robot? A ghost? A clone? A simulation? In his own time, Carp pondered all of these scenarios through his fiction—and now, as he treks from Studio City to Venice Beach and onward into the paranoid sprawl of 21st-century Los Angeles, he will be called to investigate his greatest mystery yet: himself. From Edgar Award nominee and Philip K. Dick Award winner Ben H. Winters (EC’s Cruel Universe, The Last Policeman trilogy) and rising star Leomacs (EC’s Epitaphs from the Abyss, Ghostlore) comes a uniquely fascinating and hilariously deranged excursion into the metatextual nexus, where existence and oblivion, past and future, genius and madness, and glitter and grim reality all meet just beyond Hollywood Boulevard. $24.99 | 104 PGS. | FULL COLOR | ON SALE MARCH 11, 2026

 

Thanks to Oni Press and Superfan Promotions for providing a review copy.

 

For additional insights on Benjamin HC from the author, see my Benjamin HC Solicit.