Supercenter

RAISED IN A RETAIL SUPERCENTER and tasked with playing war games on the Siege Arena video console, corporate sponsored Buy-All associate G.E. Westinghouse may just be the most well-trained recruit to come out of the Buy-All Virtual Training Corps - but his methodological precision in battle is often criticized as cowardly, if not somewhat apathetic. He lives in a quiet, uppershelf compartment on Aisle 17 with his young sister Nestle, an aspiring painter beholden by her imaginative renderings of outer space. Here, order is maintained by instilling a sense of fear in the resident associates that their capitalistic livelihood depends on victory in a war waged against the ideology of “Schwagism” on the distant planet Pepsicon. Upon discovering a strange blueprint and suspecting there may be more to his universe than meets the eye, G.E. ventures to the abandoned aisles of the Supercenter, where a band of insurgents refuse employment and call themselves the United Associates Cooperative. Led by one of the Supercenter’s only adults, the UAC seeks to undermine the authority of Management and plans to sabotage the minds of Supercenter Associates. As the Supercenter begins to descend into chaos, G.E. suffers from terrifying dreams that compel him to find a way, any way, beyond the walls of Supercenter #1501

"Jason Rizos’ first novel, Supercenter, is a wildly imaginative work of science fiction with a strong allegorical dimension, like Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris. Set in a sealed Supercenter, it portrays a world in itself, as enclosed as a space ship, where children are raised without knowing anything about the outside world. Their ultimate purpose is hidden from them, even as their education consists of violent video games. The reader reels at the strange familiarity of the place, and the mountain of lies it is built on. The writing is exceptionally vivid and compelling, as is the best science fiction, and full of surprises. No reader will ever enter a supercenter again without being haunted by this hallucinatory vision."

Between fervent rounds of first-person-shooter games, risking his life on the Columbia river with a kite and surfboard, brewing homemade beer, and cynically decrying America’s continued free fall into corporate fascism on his blog at Supercenternation.com, Jason Rizos plays a mild-mannered teacher of writing and literature at Portland Community College. He resides in Portland with his wife and two whippets of profoundly polarized intelligence capacity.

Prior to his teaching career, he deeply drank the cup of 9-to-5 malaise, occupying a cubicle for various unholy corporations in uninspired and despicable positions – as a technology sales representative, call center lackey, peddler of dangerous diet pills, and internet plagiarizer, to name a few. This is his first novel. He also writes short fiction and creative nonfiction, including a book on beer brewing hardware called “The Frugal Homebrewer’s Companion.”

His numerous awards and accolades would be listed here if he did not find doing so completely vain and if those awards existed. But this one time he went to graduate school and earned an MFA degree in fiction writing. Both this and his undergraduate degree went down in the Missouri University system, the state in which he was born and raised; St. Louis County. There, the strip malls and subdivisions go on for so long without reprieve and the sky can be so colorless from pollution that he once felt like he was driving his car through an indoor mall people lived in that went on forever and then decided he would write a book called Supercenter about this horrifying inclination so that others may share in the experience.