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The Returnables: A love story about garbage and The King
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 9 2026
Pages: 308
Weight: 0.91
Height: 0.65 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Gary Plotz's life is a monument to mediocrity. Then a mysterious carpetbag appears on his porch, and suddenly he's a handler for Providence Freight & Salvage, a shadowy afterlife temp agency that recalls dead celebrities and puts them back to work.
His first assignment: Elvis Presley. Twenty years tarnished, sleeping in Gary's garage, avoiding his own cosmic baggage and everyone else's.
This is Buffalo in winter. The Bills are almost winning it all. The cold is personal. And Gary, dead-adjacent from an incident he won't discuss, has a problem: the carpetbag collects the detritus of abandoned lives, and if it isn't filled before Terrence shows up, an officious disco-pimp Elf with a Black Auto of Death and absolutely no patience, Gary is next.
What follows is a tour through the absurd bureaucracy of the afterlife, the profound personal wreckage of dead legends, and one man's reckoning with everything he buried so deep he forgot it was there. The bag isn't just for five-cent deposits. It's a cosmic confessional. And it's running out of room.
You'll love this if you:
- Think Elvis deserved a stranger second act
- Want your existential crisis delivered with a Buffalo accent
- Love Christopher Moore, Tom Robbins, or anybody who makes the afterlife feel like a temp job
- Believe redemption should cost exactly five cents
- Often say Go Bills! as a greeting
The bag is filling up. Gary's running out of time. And Elvis won't stop playing Suspicious Minds in the garage.
For readers of Douglas Adams, Nick Hornby, and anyone who has ever filled a garbage bag with returnables and felt, briefly, like they were getting away with something.
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