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Easy, quick, fun, doomed, gruesome and beautiful, this 50-page book of splashy countercultural stories features (among other things) a twisted reincarnation, the revenge of a mime, a doomtelling fortune cookie, and a shining disaster map on fire—plus some luminous aphorisms from an apocalypse junkie who summons heavenly destruction upon his poor world.
The author sez: “What’s up? These stories and spirals are upgrades of pieces I penned when I was 15 to 18. Nearly twenty years later, I have rewritten and arranged them so that their themes flow and blur into one another. Squint and you’ll see a double meaning: on one level there are the pulpy surreal plots about paranormal emergencies or repeating boy and girl characters struggling like flies on sticky paper—but on a deeper level, there is the teenage writer expressing all his deepest fears and desires via a bloodthirsty no-holds-barred shadow battle. There are layers of depth, if you choose to slow down and read against the writer, yet these stories are made to be sped through, set up like a row of hypodermics on springs jabbing out to inject their ideas straight into your eyes. Show me another book this short with so many ideas, and I promise I will eat my pen on camera, weeping at the horrible crunch of plastic and (far worse) the rending agony of public humiliation.”