★Deadly ironic. Killingly absurd. Russia’s rocketing literary star comes through with a gritty statement on the banality of evil in a darkly literary pastiche of Men In Black.

　　Igor gets suspended from his bookkeeping job at the local police after a failed (and doomed) attempt to publicize shadowy “business” operations in the department. After a year wasted in languid attempts to find a new job, squabbling routinely with his wife and baby-sitting their six-year-old son, Igor receives an offer to join a special law enforcement department. Located in an abandoned boiler station on the city’s outskirts, the unit enrolls former police offices and special services agents with blots on their personnel files. There’s an alcoholic tight-fisted accountant Rinat, a pedophilic agent named Phil, a steadyminded agent Igor Vasilievich, the smart and unpredictable son of a high-scale businessman, nicknamed the Kid, and the department head who is nicknamed, suggestively, SS. Well, nobody’s perfect, reckons Igor, and quickly assimilates with his new colleagues, exchanging jokes over coffee and cigarettes, and fi ling reports on completed missions. What makes the department special and secret is its missions: at times the staff interview people (Igor is responsible for interrogations and receives the list of questions the day of the mission) and eliminate the interviewee thereafter. The choice of the interviewees– targets – is never explained, and it remains inexplicably chaotic to Igor and the other staff members. And so Igor pictures a middle-aged single mother (probably an ordinary office manager) with a kid, the kid murdered as well; an alcoholic with a neighbor who is the interview’s unwitting witness; a pensioner; a hipster. The interviews and eventual murders occur at targets’ home or the detained are delivered to the department’s headquarters. Igor and his colleagues consider various explanations of the goal of their missions as well as the choice of the targets, everything from anti-terroristic activity to a proactive plan against an alien invasion. Yet nobody in the department refuses to implement their part of the job. Igor’s reaction to the department’s routine propels him through many phases – from denial and despair to a melancholic indifference. Then one day the department is dissolved.

　　Alexei Salnikov smartly manipulates the reader into sympathizing more with murderers at work than with their random victims. Salnikov is at his best when depicting the chthonic irrational chill in the quotidian routine of provincial life. The Gogolesque vividness in the portrait gallery of his characters is a tantalizing attraction in Salnikov’s literary work. Provocations are at the root of Salnikov’s addictive charm. The reader - along with the novel’s protagonist – thus searches desperately for an explanation of the dreadful routine, but there is no space for a definitive clue in the absurdist and ambiguous reality that Salnikov conjures with a fresh brilliance, just as there is no chance to justify the violent nature of power.

Alexei Salnikov

　　Alexei Salnikov (1978) was born in Tartu, Estonia. Since early childhood he has been living in the Ural region. Salnikov moved to Yekaterinburg in 2005. He has worked as a boiler-room operator, a garage mechanic, a guard, a plumber and a freelance journalist and translator from the English language. Eugene Turenko – the founder of the poetic school in Tagil championed Alexei Salnikov as a poet. Salnikov is a published author of several collections of poetry.
　　His debut novel, the Department, was published in the literary magazine «Volga», which also chose for publication his next novel, the Petrovs. In And Around the Flu. Volga nominated the Petrovs for the Big Book Award, the novel entered the shortlist and became the fi nalist of the season, critics unanimously called the novel a literary discovery of the year, and it played a chord with a vast readership all over Russia.