Top Ten Reads of 2021

Keep in mind, as always, these are my favorite books that I read in 2021. Not all of them were published this year. I encourage you to check all of them out.

10. No Tiger by Mika 

Violent and beautiful poems about war, identity, and the internet. 

Buy here

9. I Transgress, edited by Chris Kelso 

An anthology of high quality transgressive fiction from a wide variety of authors. 

Full review here

8. Fragments of a Revolution by Seb Doubinsky  

Doubinsky's excellent political novel exploring the life of a failed revolutionary in Mexico. 

Full review here

7. Lord Horror by David Britton  

A transgressive classic from a tragically recently deceased author. 

Full review here

6. Four Circles by Meg McCarville

A story of a woman's fucked up life through four cities in the US. It made me laugh, cringe, and want more from this author.  

Full review here

5. Ask the Dust by John Fante 

It's easy to see why this was Bukowski's favorite book. 

Buy here

4. The Complete Stories of JG Ballard 

This collection shows that Ballard wasn't just a great novelist, but a master of the short form. 

Buy here

3. The Secret Diary of a Soundcloud Rapper by Young Stepdad 

The funniest book I read that was also incredibly affecting. 

Full review here

2. My Dead Book by Nate Lippens

An amazing debut painting a vivid picture of the joys and tragedies of the life of a marginalized person.

Full review here

1. Forever by Thomas Moore 

Dark, poetic, tragic, and an all around amazing read. Thomas Moore continues to be one of my favorites working today. 

Full review here

Honorable Mentions

- The Tumors Made Me Interesting by Matthew Revert
- The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
- The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
- Dead Inside by Chandler Morrison
- Jackanape and the Fingermen by D. Harlan Wilson

Double Release Day: The Celestial Bandit and The Christmas Movie

Today, I have two releases to announce. 

First, The Celestial Bandit, a tribute anthology to Comte de Lautréamont, is out from Kernpunkt Press. My story, "The Shark Child," is my contribution. I'm very proud to be part of this line up. 

 

 

Pick up The Celestial Bandit from here.

The other is my contribution to the Godless.com event, AntiChristmas. It's called "The Christmas Movie," and I think it's one of my best stories so far. If you pick it up today, Dec. 7th, for only 50 cents, you'll be entered to win a $50 gift card to Godless. 

  

 

Pick up "The Christmas Movie" from here.

Introducing Rob Ramirez with "Her Legs"

 

Rob Ramirez released his first story this week. It's a bizarro erotica story heavily inspired by Yasunari Kawabata's "One Arm." 

The Godless edition also includes a bonus poem from me. I hope you'll check it out and enjoy it. 

Get it from Godless

or

Get it from Amazon

Music is Over! Excerpt + Pre-orders Now Available

 

 

Over at the Malarkey Books website, you can now read the first chapter of Music is Over! to whet your appetite for the while thing. 

If you enjoy it, you can pre-order the book at a discount here. The book will be released properly February of 2022.

NEW STORIES: Celestial/Chthonic #31DaysofGodless

 

My set of two stories, as part of the Godless.com Halloween event #31DaysofGodless, is now available. This is being released along with Bone Cider by Lucas Magnum, so be sure to pick that up as well. 

Buy it here.

Brief Thoughts 31

ABBA Gold (33 1/3) by Elisabeth Vincentelli

ABBA's back in 2021. They've released two singles, they're putting out a new album soon, and they're going on tour together again for the first time in several decades. No better time to pick this up.

The book makes a fairly solid case for Gold being ABBA's most important album, though I still think The Visitors is their magnum opus. The album helped put some distance between the cheesy 70's disco image they were known for and introduced them to a new generation of listeners. For myself, Gold was the first I heard of them as a kid. Even pompous, rockist critics started to take them more seriously. There's a reason several ABBA songs have been covered by metal bands, and not just for the novelty factor.

Reading it did make me realize the main reason why, even now, they're still widely considered a lightweight band for wine moms in spite of their craft as songwriters and musicians, a catalogue of songs that have stood the test of time, and their importance to LGBT+ subcultures. It's not just that they made pop. Madonna made pop, and she's still considered a living legend, even while she keeps embarrassing herself. There's no real mythos to ABBA. They were two couples who made a lot of songs together, both amicably divorced, and then they went their separate ways for years, largely keeping out of the news. The closest to anything is the fact that Frida's father was a German soldier during WWII. Just a soldier, not an SS officer or some war criminal. The ABBA story has no major drama, no suicides, no drug abuse, no mental breakdowns, no controversies, no early deaths. It was just two men and two women making well-crafted pop music. While it shouldn't matter to the music, people still love a juicy story attached to their legends.

Obviously, I love me some ABBA. One of my novels is named after and inspired by one of their B-sides, I'm excited for the new album, and, if they come near me, I'll definitely be going to one of their shows. If you do too, it's worth picking this up and getting some insight into the stories behind the songs and how Gold was put together. 

Buy the book here.

Dead Inside by Chandler Morrison  

This book has become somewhat infamous due to both its content and for a reading Morrison did from it which probably did more to kill the convention it was at than Covid-19.

So, what is Dead Inside?

The elevator pitch is that it's a love story between a necrophile and a cannibal. An anhedonic hospital security guard who only feels any sort of pleasure when he's fucking corpses has his world turned upside down when he meets a maternity doctor with a compulsion to eat dead bodies. Specifically infants.

You can tell when Morrison wrote this, he wasn't really going for an extreme horror or splatterpunk story. In fact, one of the flaws in the book is that his influences are a bit too obvious at times. The unnamed title character's excuse of "I have to check the monitors" to get away from people is very reminiscent of Patrick Bateman's "I have to return some videotapes" in American Psycho. He also delivers a rant against normalcy at one point which reminded me a lot of the "choose life" rant from Trainspotting.

For me, it wasn't as shocking or disgusting as others seemed to have found it. This was mostly because there's a dark humor in it which offset a lot of the more unpleasant scenes. This is why I found Less Than Zero more disturbing than American Psycho, the latter has a lot of dark humor and other devices that distance the reader from the horror while the former just plainly describes it.

However, the dark humor was engaging and, at times, hilarious. I also very much enjoyed the story on multiple levels. It works well as a twisted romance. Morrison makes the unlikely scenario sound plausible. The way the main character struggles with his feelings works very well, too. I've struggled with depression most of my life as have some people very important to me. Seeing the way the main character sabotages a chance at being happy because he's pushed himself so far into a fortress of his own misery was all too familiar, even if he's kind of douchebag and he fucks dead bodies. The contrast between how the main character and his love interest deal with their neuroses (to put it mildly) is an interesting look at the different ways people deal with their alienation.

Don't get me wrong, there's still some really offensive shit in this book that will send a lot of people packing upon reading it, so there's your warning. I'm probably just jaded, but this book worked for me on the level of being an examination of people who have to struggle to feel a connection with others than a gross horror story. 

Buy the book here.

Dancin' in September: Updates

As I announced on my social media a couple days ago, I've got two books coming out soon.

The first is a book of plays, tentatively titled PLAYS/hauntologies, coming out from Madness Heart Press. It's currently in the editing stages.

The second is a novel called Music is Over. The cover, done by the very talented Mark Wilson, is below. It will be out from Malarkey Books early next year. In a few days, you'll be able to go to malarkeybooks.com to subscribe to their book club to receive this book and all of Malarkey Books' 2022 releases.

I'm about halfway through my current novel Candy Shopping at the End of the World. I took a break to work on some other things. I'll be back to finishing that and more details will come soon.

Elaine is on sale for $0.99 on Amazon Kindle until Saturday (09/04/21). This is a good chance to head over and grab that if you haven't. If you enjoy it, please also consider picking up its short follow-up, I'm a Marionette. That's available for Kindle Unlimited for free or on Godless.com with bonus material for only $0.50.

Other projects I'm working on include a collection of media-themed horror stories, tentatively titled Saturday Morning Mind Control and Other Fatal Strategies, and an as of yet untitled poetry collection which, so far, is my personal and emotional. I look forward to sharing those both with you all when they're finished.  

 

NOW AVAILBLE: I'm a Marionette (Or, The Nowhere Train for Elaine)

This short follow up to my last novel, Elaine, is now available as an eBook on Amazon and Godless. I recommend picking up the Godless version. Not only is it cheaper, but it comes with three bonus poems. 

Amazon

Godless.com

What People Are Saying About Ben Arzate

 My friend Anita Dalton, who runs one of my favorite blogs, did an excellent review of Elaine. 

Read it here. 

Francis Nally AKA Pilleater also did an overview of my work as a reviewer and an author. Watch it below. 

Book Review: Widespread Panic by James Ellroy

 

Freddy Otash was a former corrupt L.A. cop turned corrupt private investigator for the tabloid Confidential. In the 1950's, he had dirt on everyone from Caryl Chessman to Marlon Brando to John F. Kennedy. Now dead and stuck in Purgatory, he writes his confessions of all the dirt he did for a shot at escaping. 

I'm consumed with candor and wracked with recollection. I'm revitalized and resurgent. My meshugenah march down memory lane begins NOW.

Widespread Panic is James Ellroy's first standalone novel in a couple decades. The majority of them have been part of a series. However, the character of Freddy Otash, who's also a real historical figure, has appeared in Ellroy's books before. The first section of this novel was originally published as an ebook titled Shakedown back in 2012.

Otash's character is best summed up by the fact that his personal motto is, "I'll do anything but commit murder. I'll work for anyone but the Reds." He, however, goes on to do both. In fact, he commits murder very quickly in the beginning as a cop. This is not, however, what forces him to turn in his badge. He's kicked off the force after the chief discovers he slept with a post-op transgender woman. Despite being shaken more by being fired than this revelation, he immediately signs up to work for the slimy magazine Confidential, one of the first tabloids. 

Like in Ellroy's other books, Los Angeles is a festering wound of a city. Otash derides the film industry as "Hollyweird," and the moniker is earned. Any celebrity that isn't a rapist, a pedophile, or a sociopath still has unhealthy addictions to drugs or sex. Many take part in underground pornography and hate groups. Any who are otherwise likeable pay for trying to do any good. At one point, Confidential accuses Johnnie Ray of being a regular glory hole visitor. Ray files a defamation lawsuit in return. Otash confronts him and, despite trying to handle it civilly, Otash still ends up beating the shit out of him. 

Eventually, Otash finds himself roped into investigating a murder. The wife of the man he killed as a cop turns up dead and he's a suspect as he'd been sending compensation payments to her for his actions. To clear his name and his own conscious, he starts looking into it and stumbles on an underground cadre of communists. Despite his staunch hatred of their politics, he ends up close to the members, even sleeping with one.

For all his prowess as an investigator and his perceived ability to see through people, others still get the best of him more and more. He becomes more self-aware of how greedy and dirty he is, but is incapable of change. The inevitability that he'll lose everything creeps closer and closer as the plot progresses. 

Those familiar with Ellroy probably know of how hardboiled and minimalist his prose usually is. This isn't the case with Widespread Panic. It's written from Otash's point of view and his writing is full of alliteration, 50s slang, and sensationalism reminiscent of tabloid writing. That it maintains this style through the 300+ pages and still manages to shift the mood between thrilling, humourous, and depressing without feeling forced is a testament to Ellroy's ability as a craftsman of prose. 

Widespread Panic is an entertaining and gripping work of mystery and historical fiction. Some may find the prose takes some getting used to, but those who like their noir dark and sleazy will definitely enjoy this. Ellroy fans will love it and, like me, probably pre-ordered it as soon as it was announced. 

Buy Widespread Panic by James Ellroy here. 

Buy the ebook here.

Book Review: The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright

 

Fred Daniels is an average black man with a job and a wife about to give birth. One day, as he's leaving the home of the people he works for with his pay, the cops snatch him off the street accusing him of murdering the people next door. Despite his protests, they eventually torture him into signing a confession. However, he manages to slip out of their custody and hide in the sewers. In the underground, he finds ways to observe the city above and the guilt that all the people possess.

Outside of time and space, he looked down upon the earth and saw that each fleeting day was a day of dying, that men died slowly with each passing moment as much as they did in war, that human grief and sorrow were utterly insufficient to this vast, dreary spectacle.

Richard Wright wrote this novel right after Native Son. However, it was rejected by his publisher who found the scenes of Fred's torture by police too unbearable to read and the less realist atmosphere making for a poor follow up to Native Son. While a truncated version was published as a short story, this is the first time that the full-length novel as been published.

The depiction of police brutality is as timely as ever. It wasn't unusual, before a lot of modern technology, for police to simply grab someone they could pin a crime on, preferably a black man, and beat a confession out of them. Fred Daniels finds himself caught up in this practice. The scenes of torture are pretty heavy, but don't feel gratuitous. In order to cope with the emotional and physical stress, Fred Daniels depersonalizes and remains that way throughout the book. This is especially relevant when he descends into the sewers.

In the underground, he finds ways to listen in on other people's conversations and the things they do when they think nobody is looking. At one point, he comes upon a choir in a black church. While Fred himself had been in the choir at his church, observing the ritual from completely outside the experience makes it seem to him to be absurd and humiliating. Likewise, when he later breaks into a real estate company and steals the money from the safe, he realizes he has no use for the money underground and uses it as wallpaper in the cave he uses as his room.

Included with the novel is the essay “Memories of My Grandmother.” In it, Richard Wright expounds on the inspirations for the book. He points specifically to his grandmother's religiousness as the main inspiration. As with Fred when he enters the underground, he felt that his grandmother had a sense of living in the world without being of it. This is something that Christianity, especially the stringent brand his grandmother followed, often teaches. With Fred, however, he doesn't come to see a higher power as a hope, rather he sees the connection between his situation and the others and believes he can bring truths that will free everyone when he returns above ground. His inability to articulate these “truths” prove to be his undoing.

Richard Wright considered this his most inspired work and it's hard to disagree with him. The book reads like a waking nightmare with its atmosphere and prose. It examines and indicts the justice system of America and digs deep into the nature of “Otherness” all while telling an engaging and fast-paced story. Even if you haven't read any of Wright's other books, I highly recommend picking this one up.

Buy The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright here. 

Book Review: The Exploding Book by Mike Russell

 

 

Not long after you, the reader, are pulled into the library of the town of Gladeville, it explodes. This leaves the librarian dead and all books, except for the Dark Book, destroyed. As you, the reader, explore the town, you discover that the town is trapped within a giant box. Many of the inhabitants find they have no concept of things like sex, death, or the existence of any other towns. 

The gold temple is both inside you and inside this book but this book is not written in blood and your veins are not running with ink. 

The Exploding Book reminds me a lot of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges. It examines the nature of literature and language through a number of metafiction elements and a fantasy-tinged story. The book is told in second-person, however "you" are essentially given an omniscient viewpoint by being a traveling spirit inside the book. 

The various characters of Gladeville often find themselves in a state of confusion, having no language for common things. For example, at one point the chief of police and a reporter find themselves driven nearly mad with lust, but don't understand the concept of "sex." Animal instinct leads them to copulating anyway. This results in the police chief getting pregnant and not understand why, because she also has no concept of "pregnancy" or its connection to sex. 

The duck-rabbit optical illusion is a reoccurring motif. It first appears as a hole in the walls surrounding Gladeville and later as an actual creature. The duck-rabbit illusion is often used as an example of the difference between perception and interpretation. The people of Gladeville start religions based on saying the hole is for certain a duck or for certain a rabbit, and the two bitterly clash. In his examination of perception, Russell looks at the difference between genuine curiosity and adherence to dogma. 

While the book is heavy on ideas, it also tells a surreal, but mostly straightforward story. The various residents of Gladeville find themselves embarking on their own quests to discover the nature of their reality, prompted by the mystery of why the library has been destroyed. The characters have different arcs all based on trying to sort out the confusion they've found themselves in.

My one complaint about the book, is that it often feels dragged out. There are scenes that go on a bit too long and belabor the point. This is especially true of the ending which does wrap up the story nicely, but involves a lot of repetition that isn't really necessary. 

In spite of that, The Exploding Book is still an enjoyable surreal fantasy with a lot of interesting perspectives on language, perception, identity, and literature. I believe this is worth picking up, especially if you've enjoyed Russell's short work in the past.

Buy The Exploding Book by Mike Russell here.

Now on Godless.com

You can now find me on the new horror and extreme fiction website Godless.com. My short story, The Tomato Garden, is now an exclusive on that site. Head over and pick it up if you haven't yet.

Brief Thoughts 30

 A God of Flies Among Them by Philip LoPresti

Jessop Thorn returns to his childhood home to confront his past. His family had mysteriously disappeared one by one, and now he wants closure. As he explores his old home and town, the secrets of his bloodline begin to come out. 

This novella is a Southern Gothic with elements of horror and mystery. Like LoPresti's other work, it's heavily atmospheric and character driven. Jessop is stalked by ghosts, both literal and figurative, as he explores his old town. While he does meet some of his old friends, there's a pervasive sense of loneliness and alienation his journey. He wants to make connections with others, but his upbringing leaves him unable to. 

LoPresti's prose vividly depicts the eerie and the grotesque circumstances of Jessop's old town. The story ends with little resolution, but in a book like this that's to be expected. For someone like Jessop, there are no resolutions. 

I highly recommend this book. It's creepy, heavy, and beautifully written. Pick up LoPresti's other work while you're at it. 

Buy A God of Flies Among Them by Philip LoPresti here.

Hello, Old Friend by Elizabeth Bedlam

Eve is a successful writer who suffers from severe anxiety. It's gotten so bad she can barely talk on the phone, go to the grocery store, or even visit with her therapist. One day, a fellow patient introduces her to the self-help program of Dr. Gish. They're a simple set of DVDs with the doctor giving her instructions, but they work wonders for her. However, she soon finds there's a heavy price to the program. 

I have a lot of praise for the imagery that Bedlam conjures in this novella. She comes up with some horrible, vivid ways to demonstrate the pain and the breakdown that Eve goes through in the story. Especially with the segments with Dr. Gish. I could hear the voice of the doctor in my head; a deep, calming voice that at the same time is vaguely ominous. 

That said, there were things that kept me from liking it as much as I wanted to. The biggest problem is that ending is predictable and, after all the build-up, reads like a shuffling off the stage. There's also a tendency of the prose to suddenly switch the omnipotent 3rd person from on Eve to another character for only a paragraph or so, which feels very awkward and pointless for characters who are only around for that long. 

I also felt that the story rushed a bit too much from the program making Eve feel like a healthy, functional person to having her become obsessed and going completely crazy. It would have benefited from being a little longer in the middle. 

Despite my problems with the book, I enjoyed it overall and I finished the novella in one sitting. I think this is worth reading and I'll be picking more of Bedlam's works. 

Buy Hello, Old Friend by Elizabeth Bedlam here.

Four Circles by Meg McCarville  

This book is a memoir by sex worker, model, performance artist, and madwoman Meg McCarville and recounts her life in four cities; Chicago, Oakland, Miami, and New Orleans. She recounts the usually awful people she met, her sexual encounters, her living conditions, and the various diseases (of every stripe) that she comes in contact with. 

The book is a mixture of disgusting, hilarious, and emotionally taxing. In the first section, McCarville describes her hatred of anal and oral sex, even having made a zine with a male friend who also hated giving oral sex. This is despite the fact that she's certain neither of them have actually sucked a dick or licked a cunt. This part is immediately followed by a heart-wrenching recounting of a traumatic miscarriage. 

The section in Oakland is almost entirely a stream-of-consciousness rant against the people she lived with in the city. In the section in Miami, she confirms that the "Florida Man" memes are true, comparing the poorest parts of the city to World War Z with meth zombies. In her time in New Orleans, she's robbed by vicious crackheads and gets involved in a series of trainwreck relationships, one of which is with a human statue. 

It was a little hard to believe the book is less than a hundred pages after finishing it. She packs so much into it and paints such vivid, horrible pictures, you can feel the dirt, grime, and smell the horrible stenches of sex, shit, and rot. 

This, as you can probably guess, is not a book for people with weak stomachs. However, it's a damn great work and, if you can handle a constant barrage of disgusting and awful things, I highly recommend it. 

Buy Four Circles by Meg McCarville here.

Book Review: On Neutral Zones by Daniel Falatko

 

The unnamed narrator of On Neutral Zones is at the end of his rope. His big house in the suburbs is getting too expensive, his marriage with his wife is on its last legs, and he's becoming increasingly alienated from his daughter as she's gone off to college. Finally no longer able to stand either his wife or the crushingly empty space in his home, he leaves to start living in the pod hotels of New York City.

“Pains wracked his ribcage and his eyeballs felt dry and sandy in their sockets. He sat up in the subterranean darkness. 2200 square feet in the house above him. At least 2000 of those square feet unused and out of his control.”

The idea of “pod living” was something I had often heard about before Covid-19 hit and made the idea of living in very close proximity to others seem profoundly undesirable. Even before that, many derided the idea. Falatko even makes references to 4Chan memes which mocked the idea as being indicative to how modern city life is debasing. However, the narrator of this novella finds them comforting. He enjoys having his living situation pared down to the bare minimum and not having to be tied down to one location. The useless number of belongings and empty space in his suburban home had started to induce panic attacks in him.

The novella does not, however, necessarily frame pod living as a desirable solution to suburban expectations. The narrator still has to overcome the space that has developed between him and his daughter. He also finds the community of fellow pod dwellers to be mostly online and lacking. Not to mention his divorce from his wife for just up and leaving her threatens to become very ugly. Towards the end of the story, he also starts sensing that something is going to completely wreck pod living as a viable option altogether. I'm not sure if this was completed before or after Covid-19 hit the United States full force, but it was certainly correct there.

I couldn't help but compare this novella with Falatko's first book Condominium. In that story, a couple moves into a million dollar condo and finds themselves alienated from the community. That novel was very unsatisfying for me. On Neutral Zones, to me, is a much better examination of the angst and pressures felt by the upwardly mobile. The narrator's wife is very bitter, believing strongly in the “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality to an unhealthy degree. One criticism I have of this novella is that it doesn't explore that side very well. She ends up disappearing from the narrative close to the end with no real resolution.

In fact, my biggest problem with the novella is that it undergoes a pretty massive tonal shift. While the narrator struggles with how pod living may not be a viable long term solution, he encounters a private investigator and gets roped in plot involving militant hippies. It feels very out of step with everything that came before and ends up resulting in some difficult reflection that would be required by the narrator being dodged.

Overall, On Neutral Zones is an interesting meditation on modern urban life that takes some unusual turns that don't all work. I would recommend Falatko's second novel, Travels and Travails of Small Minds, over this one. If that one leaves you wanting more of Falatko's work, however, this is worth picking up. 

Buy On Neutral Zones by Daniel Falatko here. 

New Review at Rain Taxi

 

 

Over at the Minneapolis-based literary magazine Rain Taxi, I have a review of the re-release of the Palahniuk edited anthology Burnt Tongues. 

Read it here.

New Play at Neutral Spaces

 

Over at the second annual magazine for Neutral Spaces, I have a one act play up. 

Read it here.

Regarding Facebook

For those who are friends with me on Facebook, I've been banned for 30 days and I have no idea why. I tried my alt but I couldn't get it to work. So I simply won't be on there for a month.

Book Review: Outré by D. Harlan Wilson

 

After a whale falls from the sky and dies on impact, the film industry, now a practically all-encompassing industry since simulations of reality have become more real than reality itself, immediately begins working on a movie adaptation of the event. A borderline washed-up actor, the unnamed narrator of the novel, takes the role of the whale as possibly his last shot at maintaining fame.

“Everything outside of the unconscious is just another exercise in artifice and subjectivity. The only difference between mammals and reptiles is body heat. Otherwise we are morbid equals.”

That plot summary is the best way I can summarize the basics of the book, but it would be pretty deceptive on its own. The book is full of digressions, philosophical pondering, meditations on film, reality, Moby Dick, and humorous routines. The book is divided into three sections, with short intermission sections between the first and second and the second and third. Each “chapter,” if they can be called that, consists of a single paragraph preceded by titles such as “Stage” or “Return, or, 'History' (Vol. 3).” Having originally found Wilson through his short stories and flash fiction, I found this structure suited the book very well.

The whale falls during the first intermission section, the actual first section mostly following the unnamed actor through his various antics while filming. Wilson's fiction that I've read is always hilarious, and his humor his just as good here. One chapter has the actor having to repeatedly drown himself and be revived for a scene, all the while the director of the film changes hands several times. Another chapter has him finding his film career no longer brings in enough money for his lifestyle so he takes a side gig as the Vice President of the United States.

When the actor takes the role of the whale, studying for it by interviewing a simulation of Herman Melville and reading Moby Dick multiple times, he's put through a process that transforms his body into a whale. There's an element of body horror as he describes his transformation and a sense of a loss of identity, an identity he barely had a grasp on in the first place, as he's required to live as a whale for the duration of the film.

Throughout the book, there are other reoccurring themes (it doesn't feel right to call them subplots) such as the mishaps of a has-been actor named Donny Ennui, The Vice President controlling the country while the President is nowhere to be found, and letters from a character who signs his name as “D.” who believes himself to be a gang stalking victim by various celebrities.

Despite the multiple digressions and the often slippery sense of time in the book, the main story is relatively easy to follow. This provides an anchor for people more used to traditional narratives while still experimenting with the form an structure of the story. Some may still find themselves lost while reading it, but even then, I believe it's enjoyable as a hallucinatory trip.

Outré is a funny, strange, insightful, and entertaining look at film and its relation to reality. People new to D. Harlan Wilson's odd and unique style may want to start with some of his short fiction, but this book is well worth reading. 

 Buy Outré by D. Harlan Wilson here.