T he first few pages of Ryan Boudinot's second novel, Blueprints of the After-life, are hard to stomach. A dishwasher named Woo-jin scours through garbage heaps for abandoned treasures while eating someone else's forgotten leftovers he snuck out at the end of his shift at Il Italian Joint, some "congealed gravy fries" and a partially eaten burger. This passage builds into a nauseating tower of description: Woo-jin is excited to discover "the remaining pissdroplets of beer" left in a can of Bud Light on the mounds of trash, his clothes are "schlupped" to his body, and then he finds the dead body of a woman with earwigs crawling all over her face.
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