Jean-Luc Beauchard, a Jesuit priest and philosophy professor, leaves both the priesthood and the academy to care for his sister after her mental collapse. Yet Beauchard's own sanity is tested when he finds himself not only struggling to deal with his sister's psychosis but caught in the middle of the increasingly violent drug war taking place on the streets around him.
Meanwhile, Lucian Bernardo, whose release from prison just happens to coincide with the recent uptick in gang violence, takes an interest in Beauchard's philosophy. Desperate to justify his beliefs and make sense of his conflicted nature, Bernardo seeks out Beauchard and questions him the only way he knows how--over the barrel of a gun.
A work of gothic literary fiction in the tradition of Faulkner, O'Connor, and McCarthy, The Philosopher King is a book about faith and doubt, violence, madness, and the things that try the human soul.
J. P. Madrox is the author of The Blood Cries Out for Vengeance (2023) and The Night the Barker Burned Down (forthcoming). He lives and writes in Dennis, Massachusetts.
“What Borges is to metafiction, Madrox is to metarealism—one of its most inventive and audacious authors; except, instead of being our generation’s blind Tiresias, Madrox is perhaps our seeing Oedipus, ready to unravel the mystery of the Sphinx and free us from the plague of human ignorance.”
—Joaquim Maria Nivola, associate professor and director of metareal studies, Fenwick University
“The aestheticization of violence is so central to Western literature (Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky) that it is hard to find a single great work for which it does not serve as the leitmotif. J. P. Madrox has learned well from his predecessors, though perhaps at the expense of his characters, many of whom suffer the slings of existing only in the pages of his beautiful, macabre yet exceedingly charming books.”
—Jamieson de Quincey, editor-in-chief, Senex Press
“Like all gifted novelists, J. P. Madrox has a talent for suffering—for witnessing it, for enduring it, for redeeming it with meaning and beauty. But, like no other novelist since Plato, he has created in Jean-Luc Beauchard a philosopher protagonist so vivid and beguiling that he seems to scorn the pages in which we find him as images of images, shadows of shadows, mere sensible particulars, altogether less real than the failed priest himself.”
—William J. Hendel, co-editor of misReading Plato: Continental and Psychoanalytic Glimpses Beyond the Mask
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