Pete Risley

Office Mutant Pete Risley

A nervous, insecure file clerk named Tim Plummet awakens from vague nightmares into a surreal world that to him seems quite mundane. Arriving at his workplace, he enters an artificial but drab office milieu generated by a mysterious device called the Space Saver. Among his co-workers is a gleeful assistant director named Mr. Drivel, who possesses the extraordinary power to manipulate reality within that milieu and seeks to make Tim his protégé. At home, Tim himself has an oddly heightened ability to dominate his wife Betty and their children, despite Betty's persistent complaints about a bill they receive in the mail from a company called Bliss Assurance. Tim insists on paying the bill, while he admits he doesn't know what services are being provided. Betty schemes to rebel against Tim's control, and events at both home and work become increasingly bizarre until Tim experiences a revelation... "As weird and offbeat as it is grounded in capitalist reality, Office Mutant is a Phildickian rendering of the contemporary workplace that makes mountains out of minutiae and reminds us just how affectively the Machine is clocking our identities." -D. Harlan Wilson, author of BATTLES WITHOUT HONOR OR HUMANITY and DR. IDENTITY