Naked Defiance: A Comedy of Menace

About Naked Defiance

“The truest thing I can say about Naked Defiance is also the best compliment I could give to any novel: Naked Defiance is absolutely unlike anything else I have ever read. Patrik Sampler is astonishing in his originality and in his tough critique of common, complacent ways of living. Wickedly smart and disarmingly funny, Sampler is a writer to watch. His book comes as a welcome and necessary challenge to the miserable logic of capitalism.” —Angie Abdou, author of In Case I Go and This One Wild Life

Naked Defiance is the story of a turn–of–the–century radical art group and its charismatic leader, written by one of its members, Florian Moore (probably a pseudonym), and which lands on the desk of novelist / editor Patrik Sampler, tasked with preparing Moore's manuscript for publication.

Unfolding as a report on an investigation into the death of the group's leader Ganbold Mirzoyan while in police custody, Naked Defiance is a mystery about a series of public performances staged by the eponymous group, and the increasingly disturbing disruptions that its own interventions become subjected to.

Praise for Naked Defiance

"Naked Defiance fully commits to its shtick. Comedy that revives a theatre of the ridiculous motto (“We have passed beyond the absurd: our position is absolutely preposterous”), Patrik Sampler’s second novel piles together irony, witticisms, and authorial legerdemain in its toweringly tall tale about, well, who knows?

It’s a house of cards built on sand where an emperor with no clothes reigns. Postmodern experimentation? Yes. Easy to follow? Hell, no. Intellectually stimulating? Absolutely.

A story set, says hired hand Sampler, in “an age of internecine distractions in a crumbling environment” and, possibly, at “the very end of the world,” Naked Defiance unveils no plans to right any wrongs. Rome’s burning; Sampler’s fiddling; and we’re chuckling, amused by a shiny literary bauble."

— Brett Grubisic, author of My Two-Faced Luck and The Age of Cities

"Naked Defiance is an arcane and elaborate fiction. It’s elusive and complicated. Subversive is another word. The storyline is absurd and the characters are ridiculous, but the reading experience is compelling.

Initially, one is reminded of Borges, one of the pioneers of surrealism in literature and creator of complex imaginary worlds .... Patrik Sampler makes a brilliant, inventive literary effort."

— Steven Brown, The BC Review