David Ohle

David Ohle writes experimental American fiction about unstable communities, altered bodies, and bureaucratic systems, often using bleak humor. The Death of a Character, published by Stalking Horse Press in 2021, returns to Moldenke, the figure introduced in Ohle's first novel, Motorman. Older, ill, and displaced, Moldenke retreats to marshland with Bertie and the neutrodynes Wheaton and Darleen while a construction project threatens the place around them. The novel extends a sequence that also includes The Age of Sinatra, The Pisstown Chaos, and The Old Reactor, yet its focus on mortality and companionship allows it to stand as a late reflection on Ohle's invented world. Ohle completed Motorman as a University of Kansas master's thesis before Alfred A. Knopf published it in 1972. His manuscripts are held by the university's Kenneth Spencer Research Library, whose archive also documents his short fiction and editorial work. Across the sequence, surreal invention remains tied to recognizable pressures involving work, housing, aging, and institutional power.