The Unknown Knowns

Jim Rath's wife has grown tired of his hobbies: his immaculately maintained comics collection, his creepy underwater experiments, and his dreams of building a museum based on the Aquatic Ape theory of human evolution. On the night that she leaves him, Jim thinks he has spotted an emissary from a lost aquatic race called the Nautikons. In truth the man is Les Diaz, a low-level agent of the Department of Homeland Security who has been mentally unstable since his wife's drowning. The department has relegated him to an underfunded project, inspecting hotel swimming pools and water slides for terrorist vulnerabilities, a mission Diaz embraces with fervour. When he realises that he's being tailed by Jim Rath, his intelligence instincts are awakened. Agent Diaz feels certain that Jim Rath is a domestic terrorist. The Unknown Knowns is the story of two delusional and quixotic men who stalk one another toward a bloody showdown - a spectacularly moronic act of terrorism at an ageing water park. With its frequent evocations of Donald Rumsfeld's language and posturing, it is also a Swiftian expose of the hypocrisy and incompetence of the Homeland Security apparatus. It is fresh, original and very, very funny.