Death Row Restaurant

Death Row Restaurant

Death Row Restaurant is a debut satire novel about a disenchanted flight attendant searching for “authentic experiences” who instead finds an unexpected opportunity running a restaurant staffed by serial killers. Flight attendant, Dave Aslin, circles the globe in search of true experiences that he’s never quite found. When Dave meets a canceled child actor from the 1980’s sitcom ‘Diff’rent Strokes’ who is planning a radically new restaurant concept, his life's itinerary is forever altered. The proposal is a restaurant housed inside the gas chamber at San Quentin prison and staffed entirely by serial killers. Combining the craze for authentic restaurants and pop culture’s love of serial killers, this debut novel balances satire with dark psychological horror to deliver poignant commentary on society’s relationship to work. Death Row Restaurant gazes into the intersection between the serial killers we despise and the inevitable distortions of capitalism that shape our lives. "Gonzalez has married Americans’ childlike sense that TV characters are real people with the now-warped Horatio Alger notion that anyone can come up with the next big thing if one taps into the underbelly of fad fascinations, like celebrities’ real-life downfalls and obsession with psychopathic spree killers. Around the edges flicker our common annoyances with aspects of everyday life from airline-travel protocol, to celebrity chefs, to theme restaurants, to the way failed relationships continue to affect us. With a style at once deadpan and tongue-in-cheek, Gonzalez has tweaked the definitions of representative, realistic and dystopian fiction." —Cris Mazza, author of It's No Puzzle: A Memoir in Artifact and How to Leave a Country “In a world of tradeoffs, how do we live an authentic life? Thus wonder a pair of earnest and loveable seekers so hungry for lives without duplicity or regret that they slip down a rabbit-hole proposition: that psychopaths will show them the way. Funny, upsetting, and unique, Death Row Restaurant is a prison-cooked satire that hits the spot, and throws away the key.” —Alex Shakar, author of Luminarium "Death and ingestion, culinary art and literary art, the act of killing and the act of cooking— Death Row Restaurant probes each of these and more, exploring nothing less than the violence underwritten by our present age. Gonzalez is cooking with gas. A darkly hilarious and innovative novel."  — Brooks Sterritt, author of  The History Of America In My Lifetime Daniel Gonzalez is the author of  Death Row Restaurant . His work has appeared in  The Lifted Brow, Hobart, The Fiddleback, Defenestration, Pravic, The American Book Review, Nonsite  and other places. He lives in Evanston, Illinois and can be contacted on Twitter @DRRmarch2024. Kate would never have gotten involved with Death Row Restaurant if she hadn’t hated Wichita, Kansas so much. The whole thing began in the lobby of United Airlines’ flight attendant training facility in Chicago. Kate and Tina, both in their mid-twenties, had just endured a long-winded graduation ceremony, the culmination of ten weeks of flight attendant training. When most people think of flight attendants they picture them pouring diet cokes into small cups and doling out headphones. But the reality of flight attendant training had been much more intense. At thirty thousand feet dangers proliferate. Flight attendants now get significant medical training and even hand to hand combat training. Fully one third of Kate’s initial training class hadn’t survived the regimen. And although Kate’s parents did not fly in for her graduation and Kate’s friends from college and her parents' friends from her hometown of Scarsdale, New York will no doubt think of Kate as a sky waitress, Kate had bigger concerns than their misguided notions of what flight attendants do. What mattered to Kate on the day of her graduation was her route assignment. With zero seniority, Kate knew her inaugural route assignment wouldn’t be glamorous. But Kate felt strongly, perhaps for the first time in her life, that after many cancellations and mechanical delays, her life was finally ready for takeoff.