The cover of the novel titled "Slim and the Beast" by Samuel Lopez-Barrantes shows a collage of sports-related images, including a basketball courts diagram, a camouflage pattern, and silhouettes of soldiers aiming guns, with the title in large letters.
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Slim and The Beast: 10th Anniversary Edition

Novel by Samuél Lopez-Barrantes

Slim and The Beast is an adult American fable set in North Carolina about male intimacy, the pursuit of passion, and the myriad ways in which young men in the USA can either transcend or succumb to that nation’s unresolved and violent past.

With unflinching humor and dexterous prose recalling the Coen Brothers’ wit and Tom Robbins’ iconoclasm, the narrator observes the approaching hurricane and the ghosts it seems to be dredging up, laying out what's at stake in a friendship forged during the calm before the storm of the contemporary USA.

ISBN: 9798989580330

November 8, 2025

SAMUÉL LOPEZ-BARRANTES is a novelist and musician. He lives in Paris, where he leads historical walks on modernism, existentialism, & the Nazi Occupation. After buying back his rights to his debut novel (Slim and The Beast, Inkshares, 2015) he & Augusta Sagnelli co-founded Kingdom Anywhere and sold out of the 1st edition of his second novel, The Requisitions, in a few months. Find out more ifnotparis.substack.com

SLIM AND THE BEAST PUBLICATION HISTORY:

Originally published by Inkshares in 2015 and selling 1300+ copies, the author  bought back his rights in 2022 to publish this definitive edition with Kingdom Anywhere, a Paris-based independent anglophone publisher that he co-founded with his wife, the artist Augusta Sagnelli.

While preserving the original spirit of the novel, this revised edition includes a new cover and layout to capture the spirit of an adult fable, complete with stylized chapter illustrations by the author’s twin brother, Aaron Lopez-Barrantes. At 158-pages, the novel reads like a quintessentially southern novel in the style of Daniel Wallace’s Big Fish, who said, “Lopez-Barrantes offers us a glimpse of what the future of letters may be.” Slim and The Beast: 10th Anniversary Edition is a meditation on a USA that once was, an adult American fable about the enduring myths surrounding success, passion, and masculinity in the contemporary USA.