Hob Broun

Inner Tube is a darkly comic, hallucinatory novel about one man’s descent through grief, cultural detritus, and the electromagnetic haze of late 20th century America. After his mother kills herself by ramming her head through the family television, the narrator quits his job cataloging old TV shows and embarks on a surreal, unmoored journey westward. Through a landscape of rundown motels, desert isolation, and fleeting encounters, he strips away the trappings of civilization, regressing into a feral, posthuman state. The book is both a savage critique of media-saturated culture and a philosophical meditation on alienation and survival, written with poetic precision and biting wit.

Inner Tube was completed under extraordinary circumstances. After undergoing spinal surgery that left him paralyzed from the neck down, Hob Broun wrote the novel using a breath-activated computer system—a device that converted puffs of air into keystrokes. He finished the book just before his untimely death in 1987 at the age of 37.

First published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1985, and reprinted in 1987 by McGraw-Hill, Inner Tube has been out of print ever since.