Erik Morse's vertiginous novella follows West Coast graduate student Everly Loennrot as he lands at the city's luxurious Peabody Hotel for a mysterious research assignment. Guided by the invisible hand of Dr. Red McGill, professor of Southern history, Loennrot wanders through a postmodern Memphis of plasticine landmarks and leopard-skin tourist traps.
There he encounters a troop of eccentric characters — an Elvis conspiracist, a rock musician cum alchemist and a rockabilly femme fatale who may be a prostitute, hired gun or ghost. When a midnight rendezvous at a highway motel turns deadly, Everly enters a vortex of double crosses, double meanings and murder, all of which point to a centuries' old secret society known only as the Memphi.
With 9 chapter illustrations, and a full-colour cover shot by well-known Memphis photographer William Eggleston. Bluff City Underground is Volume Two of Mondo Memphis, a dual encyclopedic history of Memphis written by Erik Morse and musician Tav Falco, of Panther Burns. Volume One is Falco's sprawling study Ghosts Behind The Sun, published in 2011 to great acclaim.
