A nameless young man on the run seeks employment at U-City’s renowned Library—the bastion of the Word, housing all forms of the written word since the beginning of the world.
In the Library, Messengers glide through the air, and Finders retrieve holdings for patrons, spending their entire lives in the vast Stacks learning the Collection as they walk, run, climb, or crawl through.
Psychedelic Light Clusters in the Living Complex provide solace via spectacular arrays of ever-changing, symmetrical patterns. Pods accelerate travel, extending deep into the Earth and to netherworlds beyond. And millions of small green vials dating back 150,000 years wait in a high-security storage facility.
When the Shadowheen, a secretive cult devoted to destroying the precious remnants of humankind, set their sights on the Library’s collection, and the Ten Commandments, the nameless young man, now called M7, is pulled into a transcendental mystery.
Cryptic and enigmatic, M7 resonates with humor, wit, mind-bending adventure and intrigue—sacred and profane—where punctuation can change everything.
"M7 is destined to become the premier librarian, futuristic, Steam-punkish, psychedelic 'I'm a little bored at work and I want to fantasize about working in a much cooler library that doesn't really exist yet but might if I squint, tilt my head and take the right drug.' book. No, it's bigger than that. Katzman has written an entertaining guide book that gives us a literary template for how to fantasize about how to futurize your job, any job (at least inside your head)."
— Bowen Craig, co-founder of Bilbo Books Publishing, author of A Look to the Future Through the Eyes of an Eighty- Year-Old Pirate, and co-author of Pass the Oxtail Before the World Ends with Kelly Codling
"Library attendants in velvet suits, baffling urgent memos, unnavigable corridors of glowing light, sexual innuendoes, inappropriate and innocent, hilarious and poignant. Katzman's M7 captures the essence of what delights us, puzzles us, and ultimately frustrates our best plans for order and meaning in life. Katzman expertly weaves sense into nonsense and dresses us in a big ridiculous coat of words as he nudges us toward the mirror where, stunned to recognize ourselves, we surrender to laughter. I was dizzy by the end of it."
— John Clay, editor, bhag.net
"M7 is wildly imaginative, irreverent, and funny. Katzman takes us on a joyride through a bizarre, Kafkaesque landscape where bureaucratic absurdities abound. The main character of this novel navigates a sprawling institution that defies logic, even the dimensions of time and space. Nothing escapes Katzman’s comic genius—not sex, religion, hierarchy, esoteric mysteries, or even language itself. I couldn’t read twenty pages without bursting into laughter."
— Walt McLaughlin, publisher of Wood Thrush Books, and author of Cultivating the Wildness Within, The Allure of Deep Woods, A Reluctant Pantheism, and twenty other nonfiction books.
"Mark Katzman’s M7 is a brilliantly biting, provocative, psychedelic, slyly (and wildly) hilarious (and naughty, yes, very naughty) satirical epic of bibliographic proportions that will make even the worst offender think twice about ever holding on to an overdue library book. More than that, with M7, Katzman unabashedly and seriously vivisects both the sacred and the profane, adroitly (and delightfully) illustrating how that flimsily fabricated papier-mâché wall dividing those two realms can easily crumble to dust with a simple (yet deft) little keystroke."
— Peter Yates Hodshon, Piltdown Man Publishing, author of there once was a man… (as ¡hey pedro!, with jokeharmonica)
