1. “But, of course, throughout these treatments, as he’d discovered, the frowning doctors hedged and balked and shat caveats, until the promise of recovery was off the table, out of the room, nowhere near the building.”

“Shat caveats” is the star here, all the more for the way “eat” is buried in “caveats” and unconsciously summons an inverted eat shit power dynamic into the patient/doctor relationship.

2. “A disappointment of trains…”

Not only is it wonderfully strange to think of collective nouns for trains, but it is perfect to think of them in this context of being let-down, of those who leave and fail to arrive.

3. “Even in bed, as she hobbyhorsed on top of him with the focus of a child doing homework…”

What other verbified noun would capture the sad, squeaking lack of intensity? The simile directly amps up the inappropriate contrast — the child/fucking — and pairs it with the frustrated displeasure of homework and double entendre slang of “doing.”

4. “…even though his medication sometimes gave him the cold, dull crotch of a mannequin.”

Impotence amplified through the purchase of one perfect metaphor. Castrated. Plastic. A child’s toy.

5. “…humping one another’s empathy slots…”

Aside from the surface juvenility of “humping” and the crudeness of “slots,” there’s a superb resonance with coin-operated arcade machines— those addictive, bottomless, and at times frustrating quests.

6. “…the perfectly refreshing speed-balls of marrow…”

What makes music in this story is sometimes this great collision of the narrator’s glib tone, the illicit choices, and the deeply visceral/medical. No one in the history of injecting mixtures of cocaine and morphine has quite sold the experience as “refreshing.” And certainly not juxtaposed with naturally harvested bone marrow.

7. “Julian was simply allowed to lick money from his father’s body whenever he wanted to, and his father had pledged never to cry out in pain.”

Lick money. Demeaning to be reduced to the licking, but also cruel to be the parasite. Captures the grim duality of the impoverished dependency of the adult child.

8. “In English, no matter what you said, you sounded like a coddled human mascot with a giant head asking to have his wiener petted.”

“Coddled human mascot with a giant head” immediately renders a kind of pathetic, corporate, nanny-stated object of derision, and the absolute kill-shot lands on “wiener petted,” the double t in petted echoing the double d in coddled, trussing up the sad little ham of it all.

9. “If you could draw a headache, this is what you would draw.”

This refers to the image of a smudge in a brain scan, itself evidence of an unknown malignancy, and there’s a real delicacy in asking the reader’s imagination to draw that which is invisible, a pain, a physical concept utterly impossible to draw. The sentence is a kind of headache, and this is a good thing here.

Austin Grossman on his superhero novel Soon I Will Be Invincible:

“I wrote it to irritate people who were still trying to write Anne Beattie stories or Raymond Carver stories. I mean, I came of age as a fiction writer in the eighties and nineties, when it was all minimalism, and it was all very slow, tiny moments in someone’s kitchen. I wanted to blow the lid off that. I wanted color, I wanted action, I wanted energy, I wanted the supernatural — I wanted all that great stuff that genre brings in. So Soon I Will Be Invincible was kind of a ‘fuck you’ to the fiction tradition that I had been brought up to revere. It was the time to write something so great and so stupid that the world could not handle it, that was what I was hoping to do.”

Via: 

Austin Grossman Hopes You Will Reveal the Truth About the Game Industry

My long-time friend and fellow-traveler when it comes to fiction, Matt Debenham, has a podcast called “What Are You Reading?”

He was kind enough to have me on his show. If you’re interested, you can hear it here, (and listen to some great back-episodes):

http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/matt-debenham/what-are-you-reading

We talk books that work on your brain’s firmware, the sense that one is never working hard enough, and much more. He also says exceedingly nice things about my novel, Confessions from a Dark Wood, which is also on sale as an ebook at Amazon now for $2.99.

You can follow Matt on Twitter at @debenham. He’s also the author of the prize-winning short story collection, The Book of Right and Wrong. 

There are times when Central Florida newspapers nip at the heels of alt fiction. From the Daytona Beach News Journal:

Holloman admitted he made the call to dispatchers about a suspicious incident and kept answering “I don’t know” when police asked him several questions. Police asked Holloman if he had consumed drugs or alcohol and he kept answering he didn’t know, police said.

Even when Holloman called 9-1-1 he kept answering a dispatcher with “I don’t knows.” Asked if he knew his name, Holloman said, “I don’t know.”

Then after a while Holloman told the dispatcher he remembered his name.

“It’s monkey,” Holloman can be heard telling the dispatcher.

When the officer at the the store asked Holloman “What do you know?” Holloman answered “I know I am a monkey,” according to the report.

Holloman then told the officer “look at this shirt I have on.” The officer answered Holloman saying he saw the shirt and told Holloman he is not a monkey because he is a human and humans wear clothes.

That’s when Holloman replied “Oh really?” and started removing his clothes, the officer wrote in his report.

The officer warned Holloman not to undress but Holloman kept taking off his clothes until he was completely naked, exposing himself to a woman, customers and other people at the 7-Eleven store, police said.

While taking off his clothes, Holloman looked at the female store clerk and smiled as if it was a joke, the officer said.

“I placed handcuffs on the defendant and placed him in the back seat of my patrol car to cover him from view of the public and restore order to the area,” the responding officer wrote in his report.

Holloman’s parents bailed him out of jail Wednesday at 1:48 pm after posting $500 bail.

I have not written a single word today which can rival “The officer answered Holloman saying he saw the shirt and told Holloman he is not a monkey because he is a human and humans wear clothes.”

• Beware beginning too far behind the train.
• Don’t expect the train’s engine to establish the whole train.
• Incident springs from the train and having emerged, changes the train.
• Question the train which could have passed at any time. Why is now the right time for the first time?
• We’d rather watch the train unfold than feel like a sentence is being served.
• A portrait is when a train passes but nothing changes.
• Time between trains is perfect for flashback.
• The train is the art of the compromise. You have to give something up to get something back.
• Two things are unique to the train: The ability to manipulate the speed of time and its interior access to our thoughts.

“For thousands of years the people have used these festive comic images to express their criticism, their deep distrust of official truth, and their highest hopes and aspirations. Freedom was not so much an exterior right as it was the inner content of these images. It was the thousand-year-old language of fearlessness, a language with no reservations and omissions, about the world and about power.”

-Mikhail Bahktin, Rabelais and His World