<P>My friends are merely effigies I keep to remind me of the animal inside my mind. --from <I>The Suiciders</I></P><P>During the first decade of the secondmillennium, a group of seven friends -- Zach, Lukas, Adam, Matthew, Peter, Arnold, and Taylor --occupy an indeterminate house in an unidentified American suburb and replay a continuous loop ofeternal exile and youth. Permanently in their late teens, the seven young men are as fluid andmutable ciphers, although endowed with highly reflexive, and wholly generic, internal lives."Once you learn how to love, you will also learn how to mutilate it... I want to feel so freeyou can't even imagine... Let's get out there and eat some popsicles. There is work to bedone." Eventually, the group decides to remove themselves from the safe confines of the houseand to embark upon a road trip to the end of the world with their friend, the Whore, and their petparrot, Jesus H. Christ. <I>The Suiciders</I> is theirlegacy.</P><P>Chronicling the last days of a religious cult in rural America, Jeppesen'sdebut novel <I>Victims</I> was praised by the <I>Village Voice</I> for its"artfully fractured vision of memory and escape," and by <I>Punk Planet</I>for its masterful balance of "the laconic speech of teenagers with philosophical density."In T <I>he Suiciders</I>, Jeppesen ventures beyond any notion of fixed identity. Theresult is a dazzling, perversely accurate portrait of American life in the new century, conveyed asa post-punk nouveau roman.</P>