I
Read Odd Books

Book: The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13 and the Source Family

Author: Isis Aquarian with Electricity Aquarian

Type of Book: Non-fiction, memoir, history, religion, counter-culture

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Well, it’s released by Process Media, Adam Parfrey’s newest publishing venture. So that’s a good clue to oddness. And while the topic is compelling, I suspect that this book will be of most interest to people who are vinyl-heads, seeking information about fringe music from the 1970s.

Availability: Published by Process Media in 2007, you can get a copy here:

Comments: As I mentioned in my entry about the Books I Thought About Most in 2010, when I finished this book I made flippant references to it in my Twitter and my personal blog. Someone directed Isis Aquarian to the entries and she wanted to discuss the fact that I called the Source a Jesus Freak cult and how I was in error. I clarified in detail the reasons I referred to the Source as both but I never heard back from her. Maybe she thought me too dense to deal with. It doesn’t hurt for me to remember that my blog will trigger a Google alert beyond my 200 readers in my personal blog and show my snark to people who don’t know me well enough to understand my snark is generally followed by some measure of sincerity.

But though I will explain myself here on the whole “Jesus Freak cult” comments and how, while they were flippant, they are apt and not necessarily insults, the reason I found this book fascinating is that as a person who is, for the most part, utterly faithless, I found myself deeply interested in the people who created a life as Father Yod’s acolytes. As I read, I felt a strange feeling that I can only assume is akin to longing, a sense that my faithlessness costs me dearly, though ultimately there is not a damn thing I can do about it. I will, however, be brutally honest that I did not listen to the CD that comes with the book. Largely, the music Ya Ho Wa 13 created, as well as the voices of Father Yod’s followers, didn’t interest me that much, but the fact is, this is a very pretty, interactive book, with tons of pictures of intensely attractive people from the early 70s. Those looking for a very immersive experience will find much to love in this book. As I was writing this discussion, Mr. Oddbooks picked up the book and began flipping through it and remarked that it was one of those books that is as much art as it is a conveyance of words and information.

Isis Aquarian, whom Father Yod appointed the record keeper for the Source Family, reconstructs the life of the group from beginning to end, using recollections from members interspersed with her own text to tell the compelling story of a man who was an interesting mixture of father, lover, trickster, and guru and the stories of those who followed him. Make no mistake, as interesting as the Source Family was, this book at its heart discussed a charismatic authoritative sect, and Father Yod was, any trickster tendencies aside, largely a benevolent charismatic authority, and that is why I feel comfortable dissecting the everloving hell out of this book. When charismatic leaders are malignant, there really is no room for discussion. There is no way to talk about charismatic religious authorities like Roch Theriault without talking about the manner in which naive and impressionable people are ripe for the picking by psychopathic and delusional madmen. There is no discussion other than the depths of suffering the followers of such people experience. That is not the case here. There is a tendency to assume all cults are negative and while I feel comfortable discussing the Source Family as a cult, it was not a malignant cult – though there were some alarming signs for me – nor was Father Yod a mirror of the sorts of men the popular imagination thinks of as cult leaders.

And though I definitely loved looking at all of the beautiful people in this book and found some of the stories in this book amusing, Father Yod is why we are here because it seems to me that it is nothing short of astonishing that so many years later, the vast majority of those who were members of the Source Family remember Father Yod with nothing but fondness and love for the lessons he taught them. Yet even as Isis Aquarian told the story of Father Yod and his family, she shows how even though he was their spiritual leader, he had definite feet of clay.

So let’s talk about Father Yod. He began life as Jim Baker in 1922 and even before he became Father Yod, he had an epic life and was sort of a badass. He served in the Marines in WWII, became a martial arts expert and worked for a time as a stuntman in Hollywood. When he died, Father Yod was on his virgin hang gliding mission and in the group, he had many wives who bore his children. In the 1960s he began to follow fellow travelers into a more natural lifestyle, becoming a vegetarian and opened the Source Restaurant on the Sunset Strip, serving vegetarian fare to hippies (and the Source Family emphatically rejects the label of “hippie” for themselves), burnouts and superstars.

Father Yod became interested in many different branches of philosophy and religion, especially the Vedic traditions, combining them into a world view that had a decidedly Christian flavor (for example, Father Yod updated the Ten Commandments for his followers in anticipation of the coming of the new age and many elements of the cult were reactions to the Judeo-Christian ethos). The cult that built up around Father Yod happened almost accidentally. Young women were strongly drawn to him, as were young men, and the reasons varied from person to person. Some felt he was a paternal figure. Some wanted to be his lover (The Source Family was not anti-gay but the few homosexuals who were a part of the group in the early days were on the outside because the group emphasized the natural and mystical power of the male-female union). Some thought that in his presence they had found a man who would help them find the answers they sought. If you are age 40 or younger and look at the cover of this book and immediately think, “Dumbledore!” you are not alone. I suspect there is an archetype we all have of the Magus, a man imbued with strength, mysticism and moral wisdom and Father Yod fit that archetype. Father Yod’s physical appearance was one of strength and comfortingly paternal to me, and to many of the women in the Source Family, he was sexual force, as well (as is Dumbledore, if you read slash fan fiction and really, you shouldn’t…).

As people were ever increasingly drawn to Father Yod, the members of the Source Family developed a communal lifestyle, living in succession in two large mansions in the Los Angeles area, the Mother house and the Father house. At some times, the family swelled to over 100 members, and despite cramped quarters, the members of the group split work, sharing duties running the restaurant, keeping up laundry for all the members, cooking, cleaning and from the descriptions Isis and other members of the commune give, it worked relatively well. In order to achieve some level of privacy, some members created plywood cubbies that sound for all in the world like those compartment Japanese hotel rooms. Despite close quarters, the Source Family came up with creative and labor-intensive means of dealing with needs for privacy and the infrastructure problems so many people sharing one house caused.

Father Yod also maintained an inner circle of 14 women, the council of women, and as an inversion of the idea of Christian submissiveness, the Source Family promoted a female-centric community and women’s liberation. Of course, Father Yod’s word was important but as he evolved his message he took counsel from his council of women. Although, and I will discuss this later, Father Yod at times made it hard for women to remain in monogamy with a chosen man and the sexual rules of the commune had a decidedly uneven effect, women ostensibly chose their own men and had a strong voice in the commune. Women gave birth at home (and I had no idea home births were illegal in California at the time), breast fed their babies at a time when that was outre and children were homeschooled. The Source Family had a close relationship with another Jesus sect but as too often happens in sects led by charismatic leaders, minor differences caused fractures. And despite the fact that the Source Family lived a relatively healthy life, deep troubles began.

Despite being clean people, when you have 100 people in one house, bad things can happen. A staph infection ran through the commune and sickened a baby and when that child was taken for emergency care, the authorities descended up on the family. Because the group was afraid that the authorities were going to take the children, Father Yod decided to beat a retreat to Hawaii, a decision that had he lived longer, might have proved the undoing of the Source Family, as the locals in Hawaii were hostile to the “hippies” to the point of threatened violence, they had little experience doing the fishing and farming they would need to survive and Father Yod sold the Source restaurant when he left LA. That restaurant had been the primary source of income for over 100 people and without it, the cult suffered financial woes. Father Yod smuggled vans to Hawaii that had not been paid for, and he also smuggled the family’s cat. The drugged cat was taken onto a plane, stuffed into the dress of a female member who pretended to be pregnant – the cat was later eaten by a mongoose, which means this book also gets the “Oddbooks List of Books that Feature Dead Cats” tag. The situation degenerated so bad for the family that they ended up descending on the welfare office near them and more or less forcing the Hawaiian infrastructure to pay for them to leave (evidently there was a fund that Hawaii would use to return US citizens to the mainland if they did not have the money but the sheer number of tickets the family would require was problematic).

Some of the family returned to San Francisco for a bit then returned to Hawaii. It was there that Father Yod was killed during his maiden voyage hang gliding at age 53. Actually, he was severely injured and did not seek medical help, as the group largely did not put much faith in medicine, and was taken back to their home and died. There was a minor controversy concerning his death because Father Yod believed the soul took three days to leave the body and specific death rituals needed to be performed over his body. Since he died in an accident, authorities were concerned that his body was not immediately turned over to the coroner. When another member of the Source Family died in a hang gliding accident a year or so later, several members of the Source Family, including Isis, were arrested for failing to immediately turn his body over to authorities. They were later cleared of charges.

It is a testament to Father Yod’s message that the family struggled on after he died, but eventually, without the charisma of their leader to bind them together, members moved on and most of them moved on to have very interesting lives. But as I read this book, I felt a bit uneasy because I consider myself to have been victimized by a dopey religious cult – the Southern Baptist Church – and elements of the way the Source Family lived set off my “oh-no” meter. So let’s discuss that. First, to clarify, Jesus Freak now is a terrible appellation, akin to calling someone a “holy roller” or similar and it may have been a pejorative 40 years ago but I know many Jesus Freaks reclaimed the word and didn’t accept it as an insult. When I think of Jesus Freaks, I think of what the term meant by those who called themselves Jesus Freaks: adherents of the Jesus Movement who espoused a counter-culture lifestyle, with an emphasis on back to the land, social justice, communal living, and rejection of contemporary dogma. Many of these groups had a profound musical element to them. The Source Family was Christian in origin, though they carried cards professing Sikhism and the beliefs of the group had a synthesis of many Eastern religions and Egyptology. However, the core of the group appears to me to be Christian, though not as evangelical as some Jesus Freaks were, and their close association with a Jesus Cult and the way that Father Yod recreated Biblical commandments makes me lean towards thinking the group Jesus Freaks. Mileage varies and my terminology is just my interpretation and should not be read as an assertion of an absolute truth.

However, the cult aspect of it is where I got uneasy. Of course, the word “cult” today has almost without question a negative bias though that is just connotation after years of malignant sects doing grave damage. Objectively, a cult is a group of people whose beliefs and actions seem strange when compared to more mainstream customs. Nothing nefarious or unhealthy in that and the Source Family falls largely within that definition. But the group also exhibited some of the more exploitative and damaging elements of a group built around the theories of one man. Here are some of my observations:

1) The Source Family was centered around a charismatic leader who “love bombed” people, resulting in the center of the religious experience being the leader and not the religion. In fact, even after reading this book so closely that I can quote passages of it, I have a hard time explaining the core mission of the Source Family, the core beliefs but I know a lot about Father Yod. Magus, who left the cult in early days, described a descent from a innocent beginning to an almost “Aleister Crowley type megalomania.”

2) There was an inability to leave with impunity or finality. Some people did indeed leave, but the problems were there. Magus says he was shunned when he left. When Rhythm left, the whole of the group went to fetch him back to show him that they loved him. But the end result was still that his desire to leave was not respected. When Galaxy was returned home to her parents by the police, Father sent an adult man to fetch her back then marry her so that her parents could not interfere.

3) The Source Family showed some disregard for family ties, making Father Yod the only real connection some members often had. For example, fetching back the underage Galaxy from her family using deception interfered directly with the relationship between parents and their minor-age child. Paralda described how Father Yod interfered in her marriage to Omne soon after he married them, pressuring her to have sex with him. Few people lived or worked outside the Source Family, ensuring the primacy of the relationship with Father Yod.

4) The tenets of the Source Family changed to suit the needs of a charismatic leader. One of Father Yod’s commandments was that nothing should come between a man and his woman… until he found women he wanted more than his then wife, Robin/Ahom. Quick evolutions of matters of faith are alarming especially when they seem to revolve around the sexual needs of the leader of the sect (and though Father Yod may not have begun with the idea of having sex with so many women, some of whom were underage, it did happen and many elements of group belief sprang up making Father Yod’s sexual belief a group belief.)

5). Father Yod created new identities for members, often based on his interpretation of their personalities. Not only did everyone get new names, some several times, but Father Yod also would revoke names to tamper with the idea of identity, as when everyone was called a number for a brief period of time. This was one of the fine line reservations with me as I can see both sides of the argument on diminishing the self and of course some religions emphasize selection of a new name, as Catholics select a new name during church rites. But Father Yod picked his acolytes new names and changed them again when he felt like it.

6) The Source Family exercised sexual control over its members. Men were given a very strict manner in which they could have sex – tantric sex – and if a man could not control the need to ejaculate for a specified period of time, he was looked down upon. Men who could “hold their seed” got all the women, entrenching their place in the The Source Family. But even though these rules created a group of men who could not attain a regular lover and helpmate, Father Yod would assign women to service and take care of these pariah men because their labor was needed in the cult and they could not afford for them to leave if they began to feel too alienated. The tension between have and have-not men was always there because the men without lovers felt they needed to work on themselves because the lack of a sexual partner was seen as a spiritual failing.

7) Members seldom had any control over money. Communal living is not that unusual, but when only a handful of people control the bank account for over 100 people, it can be a very negative thing.

8) The group substituted Father Yod’s common sense for their own. Though clean people, close quarters created a staph infection that ran through the group that was not treated medically and led to problems, the most obvious being Anastasia and her baby. Anastasia had a staph infection in her breast yet continued breast feeding, as the group did not approve of bottle feeding. Her infant fell very ill with staph but did not immediately receive medical care because Father Yod taught the rejection of conventional medicine. The child almost died and Anastasia almost lost her breast. Two children died in the cult. One baby who was clearly failing to thrive evidently never received any medical care before she died, or if she did, it wasn’t mentioned in the book. One of Magus’ sons became very ill with an ear infection and the treatment Father Yod recommended was to shine colored lights on the boy and chant for him. On a more ridiculous level, Father Yod told people to stop wearing their glasses in order to build their eye muscles. Father Yod proclaimed the group for a while would only eat fruits and vegetables whose colors reflected the rainbow. To have followed any of this indicates that Father Yod’s magnetism was more important than common sense.

9) The group had to operate in secrecy, though I openly admit that in a climate where home births were illegal and breast feeding was seen as odd, some secrecy was needed. However, this secrecy set up an us versus them mentality that created hardship. When Anastasia’s baby almost died and it looked like child protective services were going to act because the children in The Source Family did not go to school, there were home births that were illegal at the time, overcrowded living, etc., the answer was not to address these issues openly with either a legal stance to change law or an attempt to work with authorities. Rather Father Yod uprooted the group from LA, sold the restaurant that supported the group, and sent people to a remote Hawaiian island with little support because he hoped there would be little interference from the authorities there.

10) Most alarming to me was that towards the end of his life, Father Yod was beginning to trip down the old eschatology lane, positing about the end of the world, how it was coming soon, and how the family needed to be ready to survive and lead the survivors. That… Of all of the sort of wacky, new age bad decisions that came about, this was the most disturbing to me. Whenever any sect begins to assign an approximate date for the end of the world, it ushers in all kinds of problems.

Yet after reading all of this, still having the capacity to be flippant meant that I didn’t feel like I was reading a small scale People’s Temple that got averted by a tragic hang gliding accident. Despite my innate abhorrence for religion and my admittedly bizarre aversion towards spirituality in general, I found myself wishing I had, in my youth, been a part of something like this. I had a similar feeling when I watched the series Big Love, a feeling that being a loner was definitely working against me and that sister wives might be nice. But then I realized how completely unsuited I am for such a life, channeling Charlie from the movie Metropolitan, who, like me, wouldn’t want to live on a farm (or commune or conjoined houses in Utah) with a bunch of other people. Part of it may have been that the Source Family was a group that reveled in natural pleasure and enjoyed beauty and displays of flashiness and only became ascetics when circumstances forced such behavior, but that was not the whole of it because as a near hermit, I don’t care that much for the physical world and other peoples’ involvement in it.

So how come I find myself wishing I could have a talk with Father Yod and hear what he has to say? As a person allergic to authority and spirituality, why did I find him so deeply interesting? I think, at the end of it, I liked Father Yod because he knew he was not god. He may have been a man who had an enormous ego. He might have enjoyed being followed more than leading, and he definitely had all kinds of issues with his libido (and, frankly, I think he introduced tantric sex as a means of controlling himself and to prevent descending into a priapic orgy, and you can take that about as far as you want given my degree in armchair psychology), but even as this book showed how he had feet of clay, I don’t think Father Yod ever lost track of that himself.

This scene from when a group of men from The Source Family arrived in Hawaii, deeply influenced my belief about Father Yod, showing me his humanity in the midst of what could at times be fawning adulation. This passage comes from Zinaru, who arrived at Kauai to be met with a bowl of magic mushrooms:

It was around this time that a lot of discussion on YHVH began, and there was a shift in Father’s deep commitment to spiritual development and observance of natural laws to seeing himself as the Avatar–the actual incarnation of God. I noticed the women around him reinforced this direction in his perceptions, maybe because this God incarnate status for Father stimulated their own egos and reinforced their own special position as “wives of God incarnate.”

Back to our arrival day in Kauai. After about 40 minutes, the effects of the mushrooms were becoming very strong and it was suggested that we all go take a walk. About 20 of us followed a trail through the property and up the closest hill. Some Family members wanted us to observe the “Sleeping Lady,” a description that local Hawaiians had given to a group of gently rolling hills visible from the highest point on our land.

Due to our brisk walk up the long hill and the blood circulating rapidly in our bodies, the power of the mushrooms really began to peak. Father began to speak, and it was obvious that he was very affected psychologically. Father made a comment about the power of nature while we observed the “sleeping lady.” The sun was starting to go down, and we all stood for a moment in silence appreciating the tropical beauty, our surroundings, and the power of nature.

It was then that Father said in a soft voice, “I am not God. I am only a man.” Immediately Makushla [Father Yod's wife, sort of a first wife among equals] said, “No, no, you are God,” and several women agreed. And he said, “No, I am just a man trying to understand God.” He continued. “I am nothing. I am just a man. I am not sure what to do, really.” Father turned and looked me in the eyes, and I could see he was deeply moved emotionally. I saw his insecurity manifest in his eyes in a way I’d never seen before. He dropped all pretense and was deeply humbled by his augmented state and honest self-perception.

This passage was the most important in the book, I think. It showed me that Father Yod was a guy with some interesting insights who got caught up in an echo chamber and in his moments of extreme clarity, he was under no illusions as to who he really was: a man searching for truth, a man who ended up with many people relying on his judgment, and a man whose responsibilities hung heavily on his shoulders.

And that makes for compelling reading, learning all about this man via the words of others, as well as learning about the people who tell the story. There is a whole lot I can’t really touch on because this discussion is already too long, like the affront Father Yod’s perspective on the name of the creator must pose to Jews, and the band Ya Ho Wa 13 didn’t interest me much. But I hope this discussion shows how deeply interesting this book is. Not only is it quite pretty (the pictures of a time past are amazing — Sunflower bears a striking resemblance to Mr. Oddbooks before he cut off all his hair and I wish more information was given about Snow, the beautiful albino girl who drew my eye in every picture she appeared in), but with the CD, and the participation of so many past members of the Source Family, this book is a well-documented look at a complex man who lived an amazing life during a turbulent time in America. I recommend this muchly.

Book: Portrait of the Psychopath as a Young Woman

Authors: Edward Lee and Elizabeth Steffen

Type of Book: Fiction, extreme horror

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: I tend to consider books with this level of explicit violence to be odd. Mileage may vary but in my world, discussions of extreme horror end up with the odd books.

Availability: Originally published in 1998, the edition I read was published by Necro Publications in 2003. You can get a copy here:

Comments: This is one of those times when I hate discussing books. I feel full of angst because I adore Edward Lee. Even when he’s off his game a bit, I still think he is one of the most unsung horror writers out there (Jack Ketchum and Christopher Fowler are in that same category – my heart never sinks as much as it does when I mention Lee, Ketchum or Fowler and people have no idea who I am talking about). I just like him.

But this book sucks. It is bad. Bad as in there is so little redeemable about it that all I want to do is downshift into snark mode but feel conflicted because I really like Edward Lee. I sense my inner sauciness will have no choice but to burst forth but before I explain in far too much detail why this book was a grave disappointment, I need to say that I hope Edward Lee never collaborates on a book again. Teratologist, another book for which he was the coauthor, was even worse than this one. Lee is a man who needs to write alone, I think.

On the surface, this book seemed like it was gonna be great. The presence of Ed Lee was part of it but the descriptions also made it seem like it was a winner. A journalist is contacted by a serial killing female in order to tell the killer’s story. The journalist enters a new relationship that challenges her emotionally and before long, the woman, her new lover and the killer are on a collision course, and the journalist and the killer find a horrifying link between themselves. Add a mean cop, lots of violence, and pow, you got yourself a decent enough serial killer book. And to be frank, the killer herself was at times an interesting character, and the violence she wreaks might be, for some extreme horror fans, worth the price of admission.

So… Why does this book stink a’plenty? The reasons are myriad and glaring. First, you will never read a more cliched book outside of a romance novel or a western, or maybe a romance set in the Old West, preferably written by my mom. You’ve got your neurotic heroine who is hot and sexy but at weight lighter than Marilyn Fucking Monroe feels she is obese and ugly. Also she’s wacky and likes to run around naked all the time, as body-loathing headcases are wont to do, amirite? We have a murderous whackjob who is a caricature of every abused female killer, with an endless mental dialogue with her abusive daddy. And despite the fact that she’s a mentally deranged killer, she still somehow manages to dress up, lure, stalk and kill her victims and hold a day job with almost nary a hiccup.

But there’s more, oh so much more. We have the cliche of the hard ass cop bullying his unhappy witness. We have a man who is evidently a poet who is acclaimed enough to have made it into The New Yorker who is capable of writing poetry that would make a teenage goth misery case ashamed at the turgid purpleness of it all. Also, he falls in love with the heroine after a night of sex, because that’s what poets do – they fall in love with weird women involved in murder cases. And in a novel about tracking a serial killer, despite the fact that Elizabeth Steffen is a federal crime analyst, we have characters who use the words psychopath and psychotic interchangeably, descriptions of mental states that read like gibberish and a character who appears to be largely psychotic who is yet still able to write out scholarly analyses of her torture techniques.

Part of me wants to say read this for the nasty parts, that’s clearly why it exists, this book. Read it for all the blood and torture and do your best not to pay attention to the shitty plot, poor characterization and outright insult offered in the details. But I can’t. There is no reason you cannot get a fix for gore without abandoning good prose, tight plot, and believable characters and details. And as I always insist when I pan a book, I don’t want you to take my word for it. Let me support myself with examples from the text.

So let’s get started. Kathleen is an advice columnist who lives alone, and because all women in novels written between 1985 and 2001 were sexually abused, so was Kathleen. She has family money to back her up as she writes her column, is evidently quite curvy and pretty and is ten times more neurotic than I was when I was in college, perpetually drunk and before I discovered the magic of anti-anxiety meds. Anyway, Kathleen has had sex with Platt, the Dogpatch Ted Hughes of this novel, and here’s a glimpse into her mind:

Platt, though not a physical specimen, looked trim and enticing. There’s no way he could ever love a Fattie like me. This impression of herself did not depress her at all, it made her feel proudly objective, not weighing, of course, the hypocrisy. When readers wrote in, fearing rejection due to being overweight, Kathleen reassured them that looks meant nothing in a real relationship. Dump them, she’d advise.

As a woman, reading Kathleen felt like I was trapped in the girl’s room at the junior prom. I can only assume men who read this book endured just for the blood. Yay, another heroine who hates her ass. Yay, Bridget Jones is getting stalked by a killer.

Oh, but you never know, maybe Kathleen really is a lardy troll completely undeserving of human love and should be shunned for her grossness. But luckily we have this information the killer digs up from her car registration after she runs the plates on her car:

HEIGHT: 5-6
WEIGHT: 135

Sigh… Look, I know lots of women have negative body image. I’m a fucking American woman, believe me, I know this. But I don’t want to fucking read about a gorgeous woman bitch about being fat in an extreme horror novel. And it’s all the more annoying to read a character moan and groan about how fat her ass is and then find out she’s probably a size six or less.

Kathleen’s pointless body hate permeates the book like the smell of bacon grease in a roadside diner. Driving with her poet boyfriend, she humorously barks at traffic but also continues on with her tiresome internal dialogue.

Kathleen caught herself examining girls who waited at each crosswalk, and she dismally concluded that almost every single one was better-looking than her. Most were trim Washingtonians in traditional summer yuppie garb. Sandals, shorts, loose, pretty blouses. I’m a dinosaur, she thought. Why can’t I look like those girls?

Yeah, this shit wore thin.

Oh, but wait, Kathleen is also dense and petulant. Her boyfriend, the poet, is napping and is speaking in his sleep:

“They’re coming to get you, Barbara,” he mumbled.
Barbara, huh? Kathleen faintly smirked. So he’s dreaming of old girlfriends. She couldn’t very well hold that against him, though it irked her just the same. You could at least be polite enough to dream about me, Maxwell. That or keep your mouth closed when you’re off in slumberland.

For the love of all that is not shitty, is Kathleen not the more tiresome heroine outside of a haughty lady-in-waiting in some bodice ripper? Not only is she not familiar with one of the most iconic lines in movie history but upon hearing it becomes annoyed that her new man of under a week is not murmuring her name in his sleep. Kathleen, to put it plainly, sucks. When the hapless Maxwell Platt emerges from his sleep she confronts him about this seductress Barbara and when he explains that he is not lying, that he had fallen asleep to Night of the Living Dead, even after she believes him she lacks the grace to apologize.

And then we have this unlikely scene that sealed the deal for me as far as the heroine is concerned. Kathleen is in the shower, and finds herself getting turned on as she remembers the conversation she had with Spence, the adversarial officer assigned to the case:

She remembered what Spence had said, about… What word had he used? Parity, she remembered. Similarities between herself and the killer. The whole thing had been a set-up, but why? The killer was abused as a child, you were abused as a child. So what? Does she look like me? she wondered. Does she have a body like me? A face? Kathleen smiled to herself. Does she touch herself in the shower?

Okay, this is… so full of squick I almost quit reading. Some sexual abuse survivors process their abuse in a sexual manner, that is not unrealistic. But this scene ends with Kathleen bursting from the shower and masturbating on a couch, not even bothering to dry off. She is not processing abuse. She is pondering the similarities between herself and a woman who is so deranged she sent her a man’s severed penis in the mail. Instead of wondering how the other woman ended up a violent killer and contemplating the harm the killer has done, she’s musing about her body and her naked behavior in the shower and using it for masturbatory fodder. On no level does this ring true, it makes the heroine of this book look like a fucking idiot and an asshole and it was foul in every implication. Yeah, Kathleen sucks as a character and that’s problematic because as the heroine of this book, I need to want her to succeed and not get killed in the process and it’s hard to root for someone who is this dense, this self-absorbed, this whiny and this bizarre.

In addition to creating a heroine in whom I have little vested, the authors also run into some problems defining their killer. The title of the book implies the killer is a psychopath but the descriptions of the killer are all over the map and at times read like utter nonsense. Here’s information a forensic psychiatrist gives the lead investigator on the case:

“Tell them to go back a year,” Simmons corrected. “This is something more evolved than your typical unsystematized reality break. Take my word for it, Jeffrey.”

Good thing it isn’t a typical unsystematized reality break because if you Google “unsystematized reality break” you’ll find out it evidently doesn’t exist outside this book. So thank heavens they dodged that “typical” bullet. Steffen, who is a crime analyst, presumably knows her stuff but if so, she is using terminology so arcane that a layman cannot run it to ground. A phrase as weird and awkward as “typical unsystematized reality break” should show up in a Google but it doesn’t and that is problematic. And given how unusual this term is, would it have been too much to have explained it?

The forensic psychiatrist continues:

“She probably lives in a house, in a secluded community,” Simmons continued. “She was sexually abused, probably quite heinously, and probably by her father or or other prominent family figure, from a very young age. She’s obviously bipolar enough to function in public.”

Okay, that first part seems standard enough, but then that last sentence takes it all down a weird road. It’s sort of hard to understand how “bipolar” plays into this in any manner. Bipolar enough to function in public? Well, bipolar people do function in public but it generally is not one of those conditions that one would think helps anyone to function in public. Generally, it is associated with a difficulty in functioning well. Is Steffen trying to convey that the killer is both bipolar and psychotic, or that within her psychosis she is experiencing a swing in behaviors that is similar to the condition of bipolar? I’m not sure and it isn’t explained.

But then, despite the fact that the killer is being presented as psychopathic, terminology gets mixed up, as Spence talks to Kathleen about the killer:

“Most of the conversation she sounded very clear-headed, coherent. Then she goes into the bit about the pain, taking her mother’s pain away and all that.”

“Psychiatrists call it word salad,” Spence enlightened her. “A fairly common trait in bipolar psychosis. One minute she acts and sounds normal, the next minute she’s complete dissociated, completely submerged in her delusions, to such an extreme extent that only she can understand herself.”

Okay, in the course of this book we will find out the killer is bipolar, a psychotic, a psychopath and several other things and I am not a criminal analyst like Steffen but all of this seems unlikely. If it is possible that the killer is a psychopathic psychotic going through some sort of rapidly cycling bipolar spectrum that pushes her from coherence into word salad in the course of one sentence, instead of throwing all this shit out there and expecting us to swallow it, mayhaps the authors could have explained how all these terms fit together and how they manifest together because by failing to do this, it sounds like someone is just tossing out a whole bunch of stuff that sort of sounds officially crazy and hoping we buy it.

It continues:

Simmons’ eyes, in spite of their accrual of years, shined crisply and bright as an infant’s. “But you can take heart in some rather indisputable statistics. The Totem Phase always burns itself out, leaving in its wake a catastrophic amine-related depression. It’s called the Capture Phase. Very quickly the falsehood of the delusion is unveiled; the bipolar mental state reverses poles, so to speak, locking the killer in an inescapable feeling of capture. The psychopath’s self-image is reduced to total meaningless… Suicide is the most frequent result.

This verged on gibberish for me and it’s a bit disorienting when I try to piece ideas together using the Internet and my own library on psychology and criminal profiling and come up empty handed. Would the average person have any goddamned idea what an “amine-related depression” is? Google ain’t gonna be much help. Totem and Capture Phase are not that arcane but coupled in there with amine-related depression and the bad line about the crispness of a baby’s eyes and you sense that this is a novel that really didn’t weigh out the meaning of the words used.

And it goes on and on:

“The killer has to know we’re on to her. But she’s psychopathic. Lotta times psychopaths get fuzzy on the dividing line between fantasy and reality. And they make mistakes. That’s what we’re counting on. She might come here in a fugue state, or when she’s deep in one of her delusions. Then we’ve got her.”

It feels weird countering the words that presumably came from a criminal analyst but yeah, while psychopaths often suffer from delusions, do psychopaths go into a fugue state? That sounds far more like the behavior of a psychotic and the mental state of the killer in this book points far more to a psychotic, someone who has almost no connection to reality. Psychopaths, in my education, were characterized by a superficial glibness and complete inability to care about other people. The killer in this book is full-bore crazed, having a dialogue in her head with her abuser, living a life almost completely detached from reality. It seems to me that despite the presence of an expert as a writer, this book uses the words psychotic and psychopath interchangeably.

But descriptions of the killer are not the only time you will read questionable psychological approaches in this book. Here’s some advice Kathleen received to help her deal with the atrocious abuse she suffered at the hands of her uncle:

“There are times when it’s perfectly healthy to redirect the pain in our lives. To transform it into someone else’s pain.” The method worked very well. Whenever a memory popped up… she simply murdered him in her mind. “Rape-Conclusion Substitution is what we call it.”

Seriously, go Google “Rape-Conclusion Substitution” with one hand and shit in the other and tell me which yields the most search results. Maybe this really is a helpful technique but is used under another name? So why include this at all? This part is not so integral to the plot of the book that the authors needed to create a bullshit label for this therapeutic technique or use a technique so arcane and obscure that it is impossible for a layperson to find out about it.

There are some seriously wacky plot devices in this book as well. At one point, Spence knows that they have a line on the killer and the powers that be, called General Command, see fit to send a helicopter to land on the lawn of Spence’s condo complex to pick him up in the middle of the night so he can be on the scene when they catch the killer. At least the authors have the decency to admit this whole scene is dumb:

The neighbors’ll love me, he thought, and then stepped out into what had to be the most ludicrous scenario of his life… The helicopter–a rebuilt white Bell JetRanger–descended amid the chugging cacophony of its props, and a mad wind siphoned about Spence, which nearly sucked his unbuttoned Christian Dior off his back.

Yeah, no sending a car for Spence. Nope, let’s risk the lives of untold people landing a fucking enormous helicopter on the grounds of a heavily populated area. C’mon, this is a serial killer/police procedural/heavy gore book. We don’t need plots lines from post-Cold War spy novel wet dreams.

Some of the dialogue was miserable. Just miserable. Take this example. Spence the detective has come to Kathleen’s door:

“Hello,” he said when she opened up.
“Damn. I was hoping it was the Fuller Brush Man.”
“The Fuller Brush Man isn’t your ticket to literary acclaim.”
“Oh, but you are?” she said. “A poker-faced cop in a bargain basement suit?”
Spence’s gaze distended. “This suit cost $850. It’s made from some of the finest–”
“Relax Kafka, I was only kidding. Are you here for anything in particular, or just the typical police harassment?”

1) No one under the age of 60 uses the Fuller Brush Man as a reference in actual conversation, even those of us who watch a lot of old television and read potboilers from the ’40s.
2) How the fuck does someone’s gaze distend?
3) Kafka? Kafka? Maybe there was a reference earlier in the book that explains this because if there isn’t (and I don’t think there is) calling Spence Kafka makes no fucking sense.

Then there’s just the bad writing. This may seem picky but if the rest of the book is a clusterfuck, it becomes hard to overlook even little problems. Like this line of dialogue from a scene in the morgue wherein an evidence tech explains things in language we can all understand.

“Three bodies,” he said. “We’ll call them One, Two, and Three.”

Well, thank God that wasn’t… so obvious that it approached pointlessness. Glad we got that cleared up.

Bad writing continues apace. Like this gem a murder victim overheard in a bathroom in a goth club that he entered because, as we all know, goth clubs are the best sort of meat markets for norm guys on the make:

In the bathroom some guys were doing cocaine as they traded jokes. “What’s the difference between Michael Jackson and potato chips? Michael Jackson comes in a can.”

Does anyone even know what this joke means? I mean, aside from the fact that it seems unlikely that such a joke would be common fare, it’s almost as cryptic as the discussion of “amine-related depression.”

While in the goth club, which we know is goth because the future victim thinks one girl looks like Morticia Adams (sic) and because there is Joy Division graffiti written in the bathrooms, we are presented with the victim’s take on the costuming around him:

Brad spotted some class cleavage, a brunette in sequins and earrings that looked like shower curtain rings.

Yeah, goth girls in sequins and enormous hoop earrings were thick on the ground in the late 1990s. Thick, I tell you. You also had to look out for all the feather boas and girls in crinoline looking like Cyndi Lauper. Eh, given that no one noticed they were misspelling the Addams family name, I am probably kicking a poorly dyed horse.

Moving on to weird and heavy-handed descriptives. Take this scene, the quotes taking place within paragraphs of each other:

He wondered what he’d done to her–some obsidian inquisitor in him with no heart.

Followed by:

It all poured out of her–the blackest ichor tapped through the wounds her uncle had lain into her spirit.

Okay, I get that the authors want to imply darkness, a blackness that implies the horrible evil that happened to Kathleen at the hands of her uncle. But why an obsidian inquisitor? A shiny, striated, glossy, brittle inquisitor? Blackest ichor? Blackest blood of the gods? I mean, these words all sound sort of good but mostly these words mean very little in conveying what I assume the authors wanted to make us aware of.

Word misuse does not end there:

Moonlight bathed the room in lucent slants, just like the dream. She lay naked in an ichor of sweat…

An ichor of sweat, eh? What the hell does that even mean? She laid in a blood of the gods of sweat? Or maybe a fluid of inflammation of sweat? And again, Kathleen’s tendency to love being naked in hot rooms feels a wee bit gratuitous.

But we aren’t done with black and blood imagery.

The words seemed to permute the paper until they were no longer words at all, but glyphic scrawlings etched in black blood.

Ignoring the fact that paper cannot be etched, I have no fucking idea what a glyphic scrawling is in this usage since we have no fucking idea what the paper was permuted into. I also wonder about using “permute” because as far as I know, it is a verb used mainly in math, implying order. If the words had been permuted, I could understand that because it would imply the order of the words was being changed. But can a page of paper be permuted? It could be mutated, I guess, but permute was not a good word choice for this sentence. In fact, this sentence can’t stand up to the most basic parsing without verging into gibberish. At several places in this book, it seemed like words were selected for how they might sound rather than what they actually mean.

Continuing on with bad writing choices, there was this bizarre statement:

“Jesus to Pete, Lieutenant. You got yourself a real winner here. This chick knows more about torture than Einstein knew about relativity. Makes Adolf Eichmann look like fuckin’ Dick Van Dyke.”

This sort of hyperbole doesn’t really give definition to the killer by emphasizing how horrific are her actions but rather gives a sense that Eichmann was somehow not all that bad, you know, given that some lady somewhere did really bad stuff to some men. Yes, this serial killer is terrible. She binds men up like mummies so that they cannot move and then does things like blow red pepper up their noses and cuts off their penises. She’s deranged and does vile things. But is she really a rival of one of history’s greatest monsters? Why include a statement like this at all because if one doesn’t immediately laugh, which I guess was the response the authors wanted, the only other thing to do is to look at the statement and realize how bad an idea it is to consider the actions of a serial killer in reference to one of history’s worst genocides. I know this book is over a decade old but even given the round of razzing people receive online when they invoke Nazis in bad arguments, the custom still persists in fiction. It’s annoying and unless one is writing about Nazis, one should not invoke them to make specious comparisons.

There were other issues with the book. A radio shrink telling a caller with sexual issues who was molested by her brother to kill him in with her mind several times a day, a therapy that may be just dandy but seems a terrible thing to be advocating over the radio, an idea that could easily become a murder charge outside of a therapeutic setting. The scene where Kathleen is symbolically confronting her abuser while being molested by a snake was so heavy-handed and dripping in false symbolism that it was a car wreck. Oh, then there was what I have no choice but to call the “butt spit” scene.

Sigh…

The killer walks in on people having furtive sex in the hospital where she works:

She knew the phlebotomy tech was sodomizing her because every few minutes the nurse would whisper, “More spit,” and the phlebotomy tech would stop and his head would tilt and she could hear him expectorate, and then he’d start again.

Somehow that was the foulest scene in the book. Seriously, a head nurse bent over and buttfucked and nowhere in the hospital is there a better lube than some guy’s spit? I mean, the only other place where there would have been more lube options available would have been a lube factory. Just because they spit all over each other in porn does not mean anyone else does it in real life. Use lube appropriate to the sex act. The anal fissures you won’t get later will thank you for it. And if you do so, you might be less inclined to describe anal sex in a manner that sounds like the second take for a shoe string porn script. But if this was meant to be just gross, the authors succeeded well.

Interestingly, in a book where two of the main characters are writers, neither seemed to be able to write worth a damn. Spence, the detective, reads one of Kathleen’s columns and rhetorically asks himself if it is just him or if none of it makes a lick of sense, like it was written in a foreign language. Here’s the column answer he read:

Regarding your former boyfriend, forget him. By saying such spiteful things to you he’s only elucidating his own selfishness and immaturity, not to mention his lack of consideration for your honest feelings. Men like that are best left out with the garbage. And as for your current emotional perplexion, I think you need to reverse your methods of anticipation. …

No, Spence, it’s not just you. I know the authors were trying to make an “Aren’t men and women different” statement, plus a little, “Hey, gay men don’t get women,” sort of riff but it mostly read like nonsense.

And Kathleen isn’t the only shitty writer in this hot mess. Remember her boyfriend, the poet? The one so good he’s in The New Yorker? This is a poem of his Kathleen finds. Also note that he calls every poem he writes “Exit” for reasons I am sure are too deep and poetical for the likes of me:

EXIT by Maxwell Platt
Resplendence is truth, yet it’s escaped me somehow,
And I don’t even remember what you look like now.
But in the trees, in the clouds, in the heavens above
even the angels are burning up with all my love.

Well, it’s not Tennyson. It’s not even Cummings or Plath. It’s barely a Nickelback lyric.

There is another poem, the only one not called “Exit” but is instead called “A Keatsian Inquiry.” Here’s a snippet:

Dare he wake her beauty in the moon?
For what he spied–such love–and in
that precious moment didst nearly swoon.
Yet on she slept a lovely sleep;
here is the image his love doth reap.

Could no one have looked up an actual poem by Keats or a modern love poem and at least tried to ape it a bit? Because asking us to accept this as anything but the work of an overwrought high school freshman is a bit much.

So. What have we in total? We have a spunky but self-loathing hot chick who thinks she’s fat and writes a shitty self-help column that brought her to the attention of a psychotic, psychopathic, bipolar killer who slips into word salad and sends the columnist dicks in the mail. We have a detective who largely does not grate, but we also have a poet who cannot write poetry. We have words that don’t fit together well. We have scenes so utterly dumb they would make a normal person curse their dog when they read them. Bad analogies. A girl killer worse than Eichmann. Butt sex with spit.

We also have some top notch, methodical and yet over the top extreme violence. So weigh things out. Can you take all that I laid out and so much more in order to get to the heinous parts? If not, may I recommend Edward Lee’s Infernal books. Some pretty foul content, extreme horror, and though these books likely have all kinds of issues, the content is lively, engaging, disgusting and funny enough that I didn’t really notice. And with so much extreme horror, that’s the goal, to be so wrapped up in the content that the meta of the reading experience doesn’t intrude. This book didn’t come close to achieving that goal.

Book: The Hookie-Pookie Man

Author: Ray Holland

Type of Book: Fiction, gently weird

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Actually, this book is likely a better bet for my site for “norm books” but Ray Holland sent me this book with an eye to reviewing it here and since that was his preference, I’m discussing it here (I’m still easy like that, but the fact is this book has a gently weird plot line that means I only have to stretch my definition of what is odd moderately to discuss it here).

Availability: Published by Great Big Dog in 2010, you can get a copy here:

Comments: As I state above, this book likely will not strike the majority of the readers here as odd because it really isn’t that odd. But Ray sent me this copy of the book to discuss on IROB and I’m happy enough to oblige him. However, if you read here for full-bore oddness, you may want to give this review a miss because aside from some mildly strange plot elements – specifically, two women have a one-night stand with men from outer space and end up bearing their children and one’s son goes on a quest to find the other’s daughter, believing her to be his only chance at love – this is a book that is quite traditional. The characters are people you already know, the situations make sense, the plot is linear and overall, this struck me as less odd than as a book that could easily be a very well-received young adult novel.

All protestations of oddness aside, this is a well-written, well-edited, engaging book. It is, at its core, a book about individuality, the need for love, and personal loss. Though the book mentions sex, the one-night-stand is dealt with very demurely. This is a very sweet book, and many may scoff at sweetness, but at the time when I read it, it was very welcome. The discreet handling of human sexuality, while making no bones that it is important, combined with the overall sweetness and kindness, is why I think this might be a good young adult novel. But I also suspect that any young adult would roll his or her eyes and think me a quaint old woman for saying so. However, James Frey (whose redemption arc always points in the wrong direction, it seems) seems to think that after Harry Potter and wizards and Edward Cullen and vampires, the next supernatural rise in young adult fiction will be aliens, and if he’s right, maybe Holland is on to something.

But I think this book suffers from a thing that no writer should have to worry about when writing: it is hard to categorize. God knows when I tried to write the notion that one should be able to easily classify books was rammed down my throat often enough. But I think I know now why this simple minded and infuriating notion was so important to people who were not involved in the actual process of writing because The Hookie-Pookie Man is confounding to me. It is a bit gentle for people looking for a good space alien story. There is plenty of love quest and potential and thwarted romance but not enough sex or even culmination of romance to satisfy readers looking for a romance novel. All the characters are adults, though one has child-like tendencies, so teens might not be interested in the characters but the characters are gentle enough that adults might think it too tame. There is a sad, semi-violent ending that would upset those who want blander fare. The last time I read a book this gentle and sweet, it had Christian overtones and this book does not, so those looking for books with a message would not be satisfied with this book. Had this book no one-night-stands with aliens, I can almost see it as a nod to a writer like Hardy, telling the story of fatherless children searching for one another.

And all of that is a damned shame because lack of clear category works against this book. A niche helps books in ways we don’t realize until we find a book that really does defy category and that’s troubling because this book is worth reading and will likely fall through a lot of cracks. In fact, given that this book is self-published, I have to wonder if a regular publishing venture would have given this book the time of day, given the complete inability to pigeon-hole it. Maybe that is reason enough to discuss the book over here, as being so utterly unlabeled is, in this day and age, sort of odd.

Anyway, the book’s plot is deceptively simple, as are most book plots until you discuss all the details: Two female friends have a tryst with humanoid-appearing men from the Hookie-Pookie planet, and end up pregnant. Dwight’s mother is more or less accepting of her son’s strangeness, but Amanda Lynn’s mother is not, and the two women lose touch. Dwight, becoming aware that Amanda Lynn is out there somewhere, wants to meet her because he feels she is the only person who could understand him. Dr. Herman Schnauzer, a Professor of Extraterrestrial Anthropology, becomes involved in Dwight’s search for Amanda Lynn, at first academically, but before long becomes personally invested in the quest. Herman has a relatively rich life of his own, and is himself in a sort of love quest, and things end horribly or as you might expect, given whatever world view you may subscribe to.

Holland has an easy, folksy writing style, but he also has a pretty good grip on the absurd. Combined, these create a sort of gentle weirdness. Here’s a section wherein he laid out evidence that Dwight is a bit unusual. It begins sweetly enough, with a kindergarten-age Dwight telling girls that they could get pregnant by eating candy bars that little boys give them. But then we see Dwight a couple of years later:

And then there was the time Dwight was caught spray-painting graffiti on the side of his school building:

FIVE TWENTIETH CENTURY EVENTS OF ESCHATOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE

1, The admission of Arizona as a U.S. state.
2. A man named Thurston Owsley coughing up blood on September 23, 1939 in Dove Pass, Vermont.
3. The invention of nylon.
4. The assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
5. The release (but not the production) of the movie The Shining.

How does an eight-year-old come up with that.

As he investigates Dwight’s strange case, Herman is given to flights of fancy, as he develops a crush on Wendy, Dwight’s mother:

But succeed or fail, I hoped this little project would turn out to be a sort of bonding experience for us–for Wendy and me, that is–something meaningful we had done together and gotten excited about together. Many years later, we could sit on the front porch in our rocking chairs–old married couple–and reminisce about it as the beginning of love.

Yeah.

Poor Herman is as lovesick as Dwight, but as a middle-aged man, he should have known better. But clearly, he is a hopeless romantic, and while some could see this as borderline squicky, that he was only helping Wendy in an attempt to get her to love him and as such is the dreaded Nice Guy, I tended to look at Herman as shockingly naive for a man his age. But that “yeah” at the end shows that maybe Herman isn’t so naive after all. He’s given to flights of fancy because he can’t help it but he sort of knows how silly it all is.

Holland executes some very subtle but deft characterization throughout the book. Take the example of Melanie, Amanda Lynn’s mother, who is intransigent throughout the whole process. Melanie is outright hostile to the idea that Dwight and Amanda Lynn should meet, and while she is a shrill, devious, unpleasant woman, her denial about her daughter’s origins and distaste for the whole idea of them meeting is made very clear:

“…think about what those two pigs did that morning. They might as well have laughed in our faces and said, ‘Ha ha ha. Have a nice life, you two dumb bimbos,’ and then walked out the door. Believing their story is like saying it was okay for them to treat us that way. I can’t do anything about it, but I can maintain my dignity. My self-respect.”

For Melanie, her idea of self-worth trumped any sense that she needed to allow her daughter the chance to understand and express her alien heritage and have a bond with the only other person on the planet like her. Despite the number of smaller side characters, Holland manages to give them all a face and characteristics. There seem to be no cannon fodder characters in this book, but Holland also manages not to give the side players too much of a role lest they distract from the rest of the book. It’s a difficult balance but he pulls it off well.

I admit that I read this book during a time when I was reading a lot of bizarro, aggressive, intense bizarro, and may have welcomed the nice change this book offered, for bizarro is often a dive headfirst into a shallow pond. This novel, with well-fleshed characters, an involved plot given plenty of time to unwind, and a sweet yet often unsentimental tone, suited me well when I read it. Given that many of my readers here prefer far harsher fare, I am unsure if most would like this book but I did and consider it worth a read.

Book: 10 A BOOT STOMPING 20 A HUMAN FACE 30 GOTO 10

Author: Jess Gulbranson

Type of Book: Fiction, bizarro

Why Did I Read This Book: The title. It alone sucked me in.

Availability: Published by LegumeMan Books in 2010, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Oh man, I have been putting off reviewing this book because, to be frank, this is another book wherein I don’t know if I have the vocabulary to describe it. Or maybe I just read this book differently than other people because where I saw a nauseating dreamscape combined with a demented and godless adventure, other people used the word “wacky” and described some scenes as laugh out loud funny. As I read, I felt as if the mental illness that is always swirling around in my brain was on the verge of being triggered outright. This book was like a descent into an uneasiness that could easily become a complete mindfuck at any moment, and in my experience, that is exactly what happened.

Describing the plot will not be easy but I’ll give it a shot: Eric, who works at a music store and is a vinyl aficionado, finds himself with the ability to speak to the spirit of a missing girl. A misunderstanding with a relative of the girl leaves Eric beaten within an inch of his life and he wakes in the hospital and that relative, a man Eric refers to as Captain Dragon, sucks Eric into a bizarre adventure. He speaks to the spirit of Jim Morrison. He is on the scene when Graceland is blown to smithereens. Eric finally realizes he is being used as a pawn to accelerate armageddon because some sort of monster that lives in “the void” can communicate with autistic children and frankly, the actual plot gets a little hazy for me as I try to remember it and as I read it I recall thinking, “Huh?” But despite that, even as I had questions, those questions that went unanswered did not derail me. I wonder if this confusion was deliberate on Gulbranson’s part because he weaves a story that involves conspiracy and the paranormal, both of which are topics well given to a lack of clarity. So if you read this and find yourself at times wondering what the hell, you will be in good company. Also, I believe I mentioned that Graceland gets blown up. I like Elvis and all, but that was pretty cool. There is in me an odd love of reading as American symbols get blown up or violated. It’s a personal problem, I think.

Oh, and Eric is trying to read existentialism as the book begins and eats pizza continually. He’s sort of a hipster and unlike many of my fogey comrades, I don’t mind hipsters. I figure they are what happened to the rage of grunge when the generation beneath me realized rage was futile and smugly embracing a lifestyle with lowered expectations was better than wasting their lives bitching about things beyond their control. At least Eric didn’t live his life around bacon. Pizza, trying to read existentialism – neither mean much beyond some passive characterization but both stuck with me. Go figure. I mention this mainly because there is a line in the book that makes me worry a bit about my own tendencies to pick apart books, a habit I did not develop until I started my review sites:

Could you break your brain by thinking too much about the wrong things? I suppose so.

Maybe Gulbranson is perhaps cautioning me not to dissect the plot to make utter sense of it all. Or maybe that line was just a line and not a warning and I am about to break my brain worrying about the wrong things.

While I didn’t find this book as hilarious as others, I appreciated Gulbranson’s wit and sarcasm, as well as his love of the ridiculous. An exchange between Eric and his landlord show Gulbranson’s understated silliness very well. He has just discovered that “someone had broken into my apartment and taken a shit on the floor” and is speaking to his landlord (and if you are reminded of The Big Lebowski right about now, you are, again, not alone):

“Someone broke into my apartment. Didn’t steal anything, but they took a nice dook on the floor.” I let that sink in for him. His face was picture-worthy. “So, who was this ‘retard’ you say was here?”

“Sorry, Tolliver, I figured…” He looked sheepish now. “Tall guy, pasty and bald. Creepy. Seemed like he wasn’t looking at anything directly. Dressed in black. Reminded me of a guy I saw on the video, smashing the pumpkins.”

“Gallagher?”

“No, on a music video! Singing about rats in cages and playing guitar.”

“Oh, Smashing Pumpkins. Got it.” So Billy Corgan had taken a shit on my floor. Or a lookalike.

And oh yes, Gulbranson sprinkles the book liberally with moments like this, musical references that I was surprised I got. I like that feeling, knowing I am, if not on the same musical wavelength as another person, at least able to hold my own in a conversation. If you don’t get all the music references, all the names and bands, it might be irritating. It happens enough that it would be alienating to readers who don’t know who Syd Barrett is, but for people who have taken a dip in this particular shallow pond of pop culture and are familiar with the Bill Hicks routine about Judas Priest, it’s fun to see these sorts of atypical examples of the zeitgeist used in a book.

Overall, I think this book is interesting, plot and characterization are well handled. I think the reason I liked this book even as I found it maddening is Gulbranson’s style. And because this book is maddening, I cannot even express what it is about Gulbranson’s style that spoke to me, but I can share passages that I found particularly interesting and maybe you can tell me what the hell I’m going on about.

Take this example. Eric is speaking to the spirit of Jim Morrison:

I was feeling more solid. Maybe the dope was wearing off. “Jim, what can I do. If they’re not helping me, then what are they doing?”

He spun around with glee. “There are things out here in the void, big and ancient. They came from where it’s dark and cold but they don’t know how to talk like us. That must be lonely, man. They’ve found some people they can talk to and they want to come and play.” He gave me a dark, devilish look. “I don’t know about you but I don’t trust anyone whose friends think all this is a paradise. I’d rather put my face on a volcano and suck fire through a straw! That’s my religion!”

Gulbranson nails exactly how I think Morrison would speak, were he a spirit continuing trickster ways. He also manages to tell the reader exactly what is happening in the book, an explanation that means nothing until you are finished with the book and come back to the passage and understand that Gulbranson managed to tell you what was happening in a manner that mimics exactly the sorts of communications that could lead to the armageddon. Words you can’t understand then, but someone else with a different mind set could.

Interestingly, Ian Curtis was of no help at all, really, even after a second look.

During a tense scene, Eric is asked to summon the thoughts of a man under deep sedation and for some reason needs to destroy something close to the the man under sedation (don’t ask me why, just focus on this sentiment Eric shares, “I felt like no matter how much sense it made when it was explained, no matter how logical, it seemed to be bullshit once you got down to it.”):

“Destroy Billy, here. They’re best friends.”

“You want me to kill him?”

“If you really want to. I don’t think you should. It’s unnecessary and cruel. Questions might be asked. Big, cold questions. I’d hate to be there when the finger got pointed at you.”

“Did you just threaten to narc on me to some eldritch abomination from space?” He nodded.

I can’t put my finger on why the next to the last sentence above is so awesome. Perhaps it is the use of modern slang with an archaic adjective. I suspect that is it, the mixing of the modern with the old, the mildly ridiculous with the deeply horrific, but whatever it is, this sentence works in a sly, strange manner.

And I end with this, and please bear in mind this passage comes from a part of the book wherein I have no idea what is happening, not really:

They reappeared within a moment and the Hungarian physicist looked like the guy in the old Maxell ads. Osborn was barely better. “Did you see the thing? Where it is and how it’s coming here?”

“I did and more besides. ‘Wikipedia’!” I gave Osborn a questioning look.

“We just haunted the Internet. All of it.” He turned again to von Neumann. “Then can you create the the universal assembler I showed you?”

“I should hope so. It was my idea!” He scratched his chin. “I’m already copying my own personality. I’ll be stowing away on the next shuttle launch to tamper with their satellites whilst working on perfecting this ‘nanotechnology’ that everyone seems so obsessed with. It shouldn’t take too long. Then I will beam myself and my assembler instructions to the farthest space probe we have in operation. Then I will go to war.”

“War? That doesn’t sound like the kind of thing we should start with a thing like that.”

Von Neumann scoffed. “Young man, you have not been reading the same flamey forum posts that I have!”

Okay, I need to backtrack here. Maybe some parts of this book will make you laugh out loud. The first reading, when I was trapped in a battle of my own to make sense of this book, I missed how very fucking funny this passage was. Man, was that a typo? Was it meant to be “hunted the Internet” instead of “haunted”? God, I hope not because I am still thinking about a haunted Internet. View the wrong page and invite a spectral presence into your life. It would certainly give caution visiting certain sites, that’s for sure. That I cannot tell if it was meant to “hunted” or “haunted” is in its own little way the most awesome thing ever.

Gulbranson is good at that – sneaking in moments of awesome wit and peculiar humor that you could miss if you take it all too seriously.

All in all, I liked this snarky, pop-culture laden trip into an Autistic end of the world scenario. Ghosts, Graceland in crumbles, terrible things from outer space, missing young women, lesbian record store owners, crazy lunatics and lunatic madmen and one pizza-eating hipster to tell the tale. And pooping bald men and a plot that you should not look at too closely as you take the ride this book can offer if you don’t worry about the wrong things.