Death Row Restaurant

Death Row Restaurant is a debut satire novel about a disenchanted flight attendant searching for ＂authentic experiences＂ who instead finds an unexpected opportunity running a restaurant staffed by serial killers.

Flight attendant, Dave Aslin, circles the globe in search of true experiences that he’s never quite found. When Dave meets a canceled child actor from the 1980’s sitcom ’Diff’rent Strokes’ who is planning a radically new restaurant concept, his life’s itinerary is forever altered. The proposal is a restaurant housed inside the gas chamber at San Quentin prison and staffed entirely by serial killers.

Combining the craze for authentic restaurants and pop culture’s love of serial killers, this debut novel balances satire with dark psychological horror to deliver poignant commentary on society’s relationship to work. Death Row Restaurant gazes into the intersection between the serial killers we despise and the inevitable distortions of capitalism that shape our lives.

Daniel Gonzales completed a PhD in English in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. My essays and fiction have appeared in Nonsite.org, American Book Review, Hobart, The Lifted Brow, Defenestration, The Fiddleback, and Pravic, among other places. I served as the fiction editor and managing editor of the longstanding literary journal, Another Chicago Magazine.