Rex Stories is a collection of stories featuring tenants who live in the Rex an old East Side Manhattan hotel. Luce, Ric, Rose and four others cope with problems from loneliness to seeing cockroaches as CIA agents.
To quote Burns Ellison:
In Rick Lawton’s Rex Stories, the occupants of the Manhattan-based Rex Hotel have their stories to tell and Lawton is the one to tell them. Amongst others, there’s Ric the paranoid Cuban, who’s beset upon by a CIA-led infestation of cockroaches; there’s Joey (poor cousin to Pal Joey?) who aspires to ski the slopes on white lines of cocaine; there’s deluded Alex who preaches life without illusions; and there’s Luce who looks upon the Rex as “the last refuge of the Real People.” Whether or not true, Lawton makes them seem real enough; moreover, surrounded by gentrification, theirs is a reality they can’t always bear. Thus readers should be warned: Lawton doesn’t offer us a cast of raffish Guys and Dolls, Damon Runyon-type characters. The occupants of the Rex are much more descendants of those who once frequented a Greenwich Village saloon-rooming house nearly a century before, the same ones the playwright Eugene O’Neil first introduced us to in the Iceman Cometh.
You can buy the print edition of Rex Stories here. If you want to buy Rex Storiesthe entire page-turning novel you can buy the print version on Amazon here or the Kindle version here.
Rex Stories is available at other online sites and can be ordered at most bookstores.