Monday, January 1, 2018

The Undomesticated Teaser Collection

Ever since the earliest beginnings of the JSH Book Club, it has always been the policy of this office to provide an excerpt of each forthcoming novel on this blog. But this time, I believe we'll just let these teasers I've been posting on twitter for the last couple months do the talking.

Undomesticated is already available to subscription members in a unique exclusive e-book, and will be out in paperback for the general public in a matter of days! Be the first to review it on Amazon and receive a FREE secret something from the folks at PulcovaVision, even if your review is only one sentence that says "This book sucked an onion and I want my money back"!

Tuesday, August 15, 2017

Excerpt from "Solar Station A"

At last, we here at the cobweb-covered JSH Book Club present an excerpt from my perpetually-coming-soon science fiction novel, Solar Station A.

Jane, our protagonist, is among the few early first-adopters of cutting-edge technology from Twinklepoint, a Florida company that puts interstellar travel in private spaceships into the reach of ordinary civilians. But as Jane journeys further and further out, she begins to learn that the Universe is nothing like what scientists back home have been telling the public.

---------------------

For an asteroid that wasn't supposed to have an atmosphere, it was perfectly breathable and Earth-like. But why? How? Aren't there supposed to be trees or something, generating oxygen? Or a body of water creating, you know, an ecosystem with weather and such? I didn't ask Dani because I didn't want to look stupid. But she seemed as mystified as I was.

The surface of the asteroid was like a bad movie set. Barren, but with randomly-placed interesting rock formations spanning out to an abrupt horizon. If I'd seen it on Star Trek I'd have laughed at its papier-mache fakeness. As we hiked up to the cave, my thoughts turned to Cody. Before we broke up, the plan had been that he'd have come along with me into space. It's probably for the best that he didn't; he'd have tried to take over the whole thing like it was his spaceship. Outer space is not a good place to be cooped up with a control freak.

We stared at the cave entrance, uncertain whether to proceed inside. Spelunking is dangerous enough on Earth, but on some obscure asteroid? Sounds very ill-advised. I pictured myself trapped in an underground cave-in and thought about what I would do. For the first time since going into space, the horror of the great distance from Earth I had traveled was beginning to sink in on me.

The ground began to tremble beneath our feet, with a deep scraping, rumbling sound. Like someone dragging a cinderblock by a rope across pavement. It only lasted about three seconds and then all was calm again.

"Whoa!" was all I could muster.

"Innnnteresting!", she said excitedly as her eyes lit up, like all good scientists do when they've discovered something. "There's no record of tectonic activity here. But everything they think they know about this rock is clearly wrong anyway. This has to be related somehow to the anomalous atmosphere." She whipped out a little tablet and started tapping and swiping on it, then she held it up in the air. She looked out at the horizon with a disappointed look on her face. "Whatever it is, it didn't affect the asteroid's orientation by even a micrometer."

We stood there in silence as Dani pulled out some strange little device and pointed it at the cave, apparently analyzing something.

"No way I'm going in there now," I said. She nodded in agreement.

Then another odd sound occurred. It was the sound of movement, of something scuttling against rock. It was coming from the cave. I looked over at Dani and she wore a face of puzzlement that quickly turned to one of concern, and then one of panic. I looked back into the cave and saw what she saw: something was moving inside there. About the size of a kitchen stove. And getting closer.

"Let's get out of here," I whispered.

She didn't respond, and just stared at the whatever-it-is. Then it got close enough for light to reflect against it. Dani and I both began to make apprehensive little winding-up whining sounds like an old-school ambulance siren building up in pitch.

It was an insect. A giant insect. A giant fucking *bug*.

Her first instinct was to edge closer and start taking pictures of it. Mine was to back away and think to myself that nobody was ever going to believe me when I tell them this story, and so I most likely would not bother trying. She switched to the tablet again and started making hasty taps on it.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm live-tweeting this shit."

It crept almost out into the light, at the entry of the cave. It had a face that was comical and terrifying at the same time. Like a space walrus. Its body was like a shrimp or something, but it had big pointy hairs all over it. Uncomfortable minutes passed as it stood there staring at us and we stood there staring back at it. It's mouth-thingies were moist and undulating and it made me nauseous to watch. I kept looking away, then couldn't help myself and looked back for a moment, then away again.

"Look at that carapace. It's almost like a crustacean," Dani whispered, clicking away on her tablet's camera. "Jesus Christ. This is incredible."

"We could open a restaurant here," I said deliriously, trying to stay cool and snarky in the middle of my anxiety attack, "and fry them in butter."

I started backing away faster. I looked back at the Suncoasters, which seemed so far away now. I debated whether to make a run for it. What if these bug-shrimp things are like dogs and can smell fear? I remembered when I was a child, the neighbors had a Doberman that got loose. I was playing in the back yard and it was off its chain for some reason and came over and barked at me. "Don't run," my father had shouted through the screen door. And of course, what did I do? I ran. And that made it chase me. So I very gingerly, very slowly, backed away. I wonder what my father is doing right now? Maybe I should call him.

Then the creature did something neither of us expected, besides existing in the first place. It jumped. In my direction. Like, thirty feet in the air. Dust rose from the spot it landed only semi-gracefully upon. I made a sort of baby sound as I dodged it and ran back to Dani. I can't believe she was still just taking pictures, and I can't believe the next thing out of my mouth was:

"Am I in any of those? Let me see them before you tweet them."

She smiled and held up the tablet. I was blurry and my face wasn't recognizable; my arms were raised in horror at the bug, but it looked like I was welcoming it or worshipping it.

"Do not tweet that", I laughed.

"I'm going to try to get some more good shots of it and then we're going to capture it. Do you have any nets onboard? Or cages?"

"Cages? ....No...."

"Shit. Here." She did some more taps on her tablet, then placed her thumb against the reader. She was unlocking her Suncoaster.

"Go in my ship and get a net. There's bunch of them laying around everywhere, you'll see some soon as you walk in there. They're black mesh, wadded up, in piles."

I welcomed the opportunity to get away from the giant critter. First I sort of skipped, looking back every other second to make sure it wasn't in chase, then bolted into a full run. I ran through her pod hangar and reached the door inside.

Her ship smelled like a combination of a laboratory and a library. Sort of a musty, rank smell. Not like someone who doesn't clean their home, unwashed dishes and dirty socks or such. More like dust, very old dust, and the disinfectant-and-cedar-shavings smell of a pet shop. Her ship was cluttered with boxes and crates and loose junk everywhere. Metal shelving crammed full of banker's boxes of papers. Crates of microscope slides, petri dishes, and chemical bottles. I was tempted to go sneak a look at her bridge but I didn't. I saw a pile of netting on the floor, just like she'd said. She had many cages too, most of them the size of dog kennels. There were two small metal poles leaning against the doorway and I dragged those along. I thought maybe we could use them to help nudge the thing into the nets.

When I got back to Dani, she was staring intently at her tablet. She looked up at me with an expression of astonishment. "Do you realize what this thing is"?

She didn't get to finish that thought, because that's when I screamed.

She looked behind her to see what I was screaming about. More of the beasties were parading out of the cave.

Some were very large, some were small, all were horrifying. Before either one of us could do anything else, several leaped high over our heads and then turned to face us, effectively blocking our way back to our ships. They began circling us like coyotes slowly assessing their prey. There were about two dozen of them, and occasionally one more would trickle out of the cavern. Their hopping was so erratic, one of them collided right into a large rock outcropping and smashed it. The creature didn't seem injured by it in the least. If one of them crashed against one of our ships, who knows what kind of damage it could cause.

I handed her one of the metal poles. She reluctantly took it and had a pained expression as she looked back at the bugs. She didn't have to say what she was thinking, it was obvious: as a scientist, she hated the idea of having to harm or kill live specimens of an extraterrestrial life form.

"So... what are they?" I asked.

"They're fleas. Giant fleas."

"Oh my God," I whispered. Their hairy quivering legs seemed a hundred times more disgusting now. If Cody were here, he'd already be trying to kill the thing himself. And probably getting eaten. Maybe he should have come along.

Sunday, June 18, 2017

Night Life

A culture is only as great as its dreams, and boy, do I have a lot of dreams.

At various points in my life, my dreams have been so vivid and compelling to me that I have kept dream journals to get it all down before the morning light banishes their shadows. I've long toyed with the idea of publishing them, and well, with my other three novels currently languishing in limbo, there's no time like the present. Transmissions from Agent J is my ridiculous compilation of highlights from my nocturnal doings, offered for your perusal as fiction.

But is it "fiction"? These dreams really occurred, so does that make the book non-fiction since I'm merely reporting the facts as they happened inside my skull? But since the events in the dreams are, of course, imaginary (depending on your interpretations of quantum physics, morphic resonance, and Jungian consciousness), would fiction not to be an apt way to describe them? It depends on where you're standing, I suppose.

Since the book relays both the private bric-a-brac of my subconscious dream life and personal details of my waking life, you might even find yourself mentioned within its pages, dear reader. (To keep some of the juicy gossip contained in the tome semi-curtailed, I'm thinking that it'll be released in print form only, no e-book, unless I change my mind between now and then.)

The idea isn't original (none of my ideas are) - William S. Burroughs published excerpts of his own dream journals as a book called My Education. But whereas Uncle Bill was a well known figure whose life was a matter of already-studied public record, the references to people and events in my own life are opaque to the reader. So, my book contains some expository backstory to explain the dreams when necessary. In so doing, this random holographic piecemeal mess of self-analysis just might be the closest thing to an autobiography I will ever write.

Don't ask me when the book's coming out. Soon. Very soon. I throw you this pork chop to stall for time while I finish Solar Station A, Matilda Heron, and The Tract of Blood.

An excerpt now follows; imagine 150 pages of this cryptic nonsense and whip out that credit card, Clyde.

------------


It's always the same and it's always different. Recurring dreams of an small but luxurious office, laid out rather like a section of an upscale hotel lobby with comfy plush chairs. Everything is black. Black upholstery, black curtains, black glass table. A man in a black business suit sits at a black desk and asks for my report. Ostensibly I am reporting on the minutiae of what I've been up to lately in my day-to-day life - the usual humdrum stuff like going to the grocery, feeding the cat, skimming leaves off the pool. But in the dream I am well aware that I am speaking in code of a sort, and the man understands, via reading between the lines, on what I am really reporting. I don't even know. But he knows. Evidently I am doing good work, because the meetings usually end with his face beaming and rising to shake my hand. There are often other, shadowy, figures also seated on the periphery and when he stands up, they take that as their cue to stand up too.

The man's office has a waiting room outside it, but it's only appeared in a couple of the many dreams. It's one of those elements that I can clearly see where the subconscious is drawing from: it was a dead ringer for the waiting room outside the office of dingbat psychiatrist Jennifer Melfi on The Sopranos. It even had a sculpture on a pedestal, but unlike Melfi's, it was of a castle with little figurines inside of it. You could tell by looking through its windows that it was fully realized on the interior, like a dollhouse.

The man's face is never quite the same from dream to dream. Sometimes older, sometimes younger, sometimes nebulous and seen-but-not-seen.

Sometimes the man asks pointed questions. I remember one in particular where he was very interested in a silly photo of plastic toy ducks I'd posted on Twitter. For weeks after the dream, I would stare at the ducks, wondering just what it was that the man found so significant. The ducks just smiled back in their beaky way, enigmatic as the Mona Lisa.

---

I am at the Publix supermarket in St. Petersburg, Florida. The one in the shopping center at the corner of Park and Bryan Dairy. There's a sign, hand-painted in an old-fashioned professional way as one would see on a 1960s jeweler's window. The sign says words to the effect of: "Yes, the world famous Buffalo Bob from TV's "Howdy Doody Show" is an employee here. The management asks that you treat him the same as anybody else and do NOT ask for an autograph and do NOT mention the show to him."

I push my cart around the aisles. Sure enough, there he is. Much older. Hair completely white, but obviously him. We share a glance and I think about asking him where the marshmallow fluff is, or something, just so I can talk to him. He looks up from unpacking crates of cans and glares at me, as if to say "Don't do it", as if he can sense the thought. I give him a polite nod and keep shopping.

---

When I was a toddler I developed, as many kids do (or once seemed to do), an "imaginary friend". It was a ghostly woman named Angela. My parents asked me how I came up with that name, I said I didn't, she's real, she came to me, and that's her name. Angela was the classic "Guardian Angel" who would cheer me in times of sadness and advise me in times of trouble, but her advice was often mischievous and anti-authoritarian. It wasn't until many years later I realized the obvious "angel" reference in her name, but this is something I was thoroughly unaware of as a toddler; I don't even think I knew what angels were at that age.

Angela said her spirit was present in all women, but some more than others. So from the age of four, I have assessed women for the degree of Angela-ness in them. Sure enough, it is subtle in some women but telegraphing loudly from others. It has nothing to do with their appearance, it's simply a recognizable life force. Some even seem to know it themselves, and behave as if they are Angela herself, or doing her bidding as her agent.

My "Angela dreams" are so numerous they could fill a book in themselves. There was a long spell in my teens where the dreams didn't occur as much, but they returned to make regular appearances in my early twenties and have continued unabated ever since. Usually there's no "plot", just a visitation from Angela with her talking to me. Occasionally she shows up and crashes other dreams, like a director interrupting a film scene by walking onto the set and yelling, "Cut!"

---

It's a sunny day and Ellen and I are sitting in the grass naked in Lexington Cemetery. This is in itself not an exceptional detail, because it's something we actually sometimes did. It was a big cemetery, very wooded, often completely unpopulated, and well, you know. What is an exceptional detail is that Ellen was, in the dream, somehow remotely DJing a live radio show via her smartphone. (Note: smartphones did not exist during the early 90s when we would undertake our skyclad cemetery picnics.) It was a classic "frustration dream": we'd kiss for a couple minutes, then she'd break away to check her phone. "Hang on, it's the top of the hour, I've got to do a Station ID" and "hold on, this song ends cold, I have to listen closely for the segue into De La Soul." After awhile, I started suggesting really long songs, like "This Corrosion" by Sisters of Mercy and Led Zeppelin's "Achilles' Last Stand". This worked for awhile, but then a record starting skipping, like stuck in a skip-loop. "Fuck," she said. "Now I have to walk down to the station and stop it." She dashed off, nude, out of the cemetery and down the street.

---

I'm in a restaurant with Dockery and some guy I don't know, sort of a slight variation a friend of Dock's named Meredith, otherwise known as "Mirth" because that's how the local rednecks, Meredith included, pronounce it. This quasi-Mirth is drinking from a Germanic porcelain beer stein the size of a mailbox. Dockery and Mirth do all the talking while I nurse a bottle of some kind of beer in a green bottle and realize I'm missing the latest episode of Mad Men. I whip out the Kindle and start watching it.

It's one of those times I wish it were possible to record dreams, because right there, inside my skull, played three-quarters of an episode of Mad Men that does not exist, at least in our world, and dammit, I want to watch it again. There was a lot of interaction in it between Jim Cutler and Betty Draper, who, so far as I can think, never actually interacted in the series.

I have also dreamed of reading entire books, and I awaken and wonder, where is that book now? Where is that episode of Mad Men? My waking brain has difficulty enough writing a book, and I'm now to believe that my subconscious mind generated one, in real time? This is the sort of puzzling evidence that convinces me that not all dreams are the synaptic flatulence of too many chia seeds before bedtime; sometimes we really are going... somewhere else.

---

Unfamiliar hotel. I'm in the company of a girlfriend I don't recognize. She is cold and grim and doesn't have much Angela in her. Some sort of scientist's convention is taking place. Continually introduced to a bunch of pompous people I don't know. As they blather on about organic chemistry I keep looking over to a table loaded with food, trying to find a good moment to break away from the conversation and get some baklava. The girlfriend senses my antsiness and stares daggers at me. I just want some baklava, dammit.

---

I am in a restaurant in Taos, New Mexico, eating lunch with Sherry. Gradually I become aware that there's a man, an old man, puckered, snarled-up face like he's bitten into a Sour Patch Kid concealed in his lasagna. I tell Sherry about it and tell her not to look over. Of course, she does. "That's Donald Rumsfeld," she whispers in astonishment. And it was. He was eating alone and recklessly chewed his food without much table manners.

Fact: Donald Rumsfeld does live in Taos, and I was aware of this, vaguely, prior to the dream. The front cover of one of his books, "Known and Unknown", shows himself on his Plaza Blanca ranch there. The book's title derives from a statement he infamously made, which goes:

"There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know."

This is one of the most algebraically elegant, illuminating, and jaw-droppingly truthful things I've ever heard come out of a politician's mouth, and here it is coming from a conservative Republican generally regarded as a shill for the military and mega-corporations.

I grokked Rumsfeld's remarks perfectly, but most people couldn't make sense of it and immediately his comments became the butt of jokes around the water cooler and among the media talking heads, who said he was talking gobbledygook. That's about the beginning of when I really started feeling like I was living in John Carpenter's They Live and I'm the guy with the special sunglasses.

---

DeForest Kelley is fiddling with some weird device in a hotel bar. I sit at the next adjacent stool and watch with interest, determined to play it cool and not ask for his autograph - perhaps having learned my lesson from the Buffalo Bob dream. To my surprise, he glances up and says "Oh, hi, Jeff" in his gentle voice, then goes back to his tinkering.

Fact: I did actually meet DeForest Kelley once, at a convention in Louisville in 1976. He wore a bright lavender leisure suit with shirt open showing gold chains around his neck.

---

Greyhound bus station in Atlanta. I've been here many times during my hobo years in the 1980s. I am waiting for the bus, waiting for a woman, I think, to arrive, yet for some reason I am carrying my old brown travel bag as if I am going somewhere. A group of young black men start heckling my goth platform shoes (which I did not wear during my hobo years.)

The bus never arrives. I grow impatient. It's suddenly night. I feel very cold and start to sense that I have no home and nowhere to go. I wake up wondering what I would have done next.

---

I dream that the phone rings. I answer it. An old man with a deep crispy voice tells me he wants to buy my paintings. Like, all of them. I lay there in bed debating whether to take this guy seriously or not when I wake up and realize the phone really is ringing. It's a woman from the cable company letting me know I'm about to get cut off if I don't pay my bill, but in the background I can hear a man speaking with the same voice as in my dream. After I've been awake for awhile longer, I realize that it was probably a TV playing. That old man's voice seems to haunt me in movies I watch - it's reminiscent of the creepy voice who tells Jim Garrison's young daughter she's won a beauty contest in Oliver Stone's JFK and the suicide hotline guy that gets prank-called in the film Basquiat.

Come to think of it, the voice is also rather like DeForest Kelley's.

---

I wasn't in Mexico for long, but dreams about it recur often.

Some explanation first: during my "missing years" hoboing around in the 1980s, I decided the time had come to make a pilgrimage to Mexico and follow in the footsteps of my heroes Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. And so one morning, then, with little planning and forethought I jumped into my beat-up 1981 Chevy Citation and proceeded on my adventure - without a map.

Back then, I was definitely faint of heart when it came to drinking. I was strictly an amateur drinker and hard liquors and I didn't get along. So, what do I do when I find myself in a dangerous pulqueria somewhere in the bad part of Ciudad Juarez? Of course, I order one of the hardest liquors available in this spiral arm of the Milky Way: a glass of mezcal, straight. I sipped it gingerly, trying to find something "cool" about it. I failed. It tasted like burnt urine and kerosene to me. The bartender, obviously amused by this Gringo kid, kept watching me to see my reaction. I tried to play it casual, tipping the glass far back against my mouth to make it look like I was taking bigger gulps than I really was. I whistled along with the conjunto music, trying to second-guess the melody and make it seem like I was familiar with the song, in some ludicrous attempt to "fit in".

Gradually I became aware that I was the subject of whispered and increasingly sneering discussion by every other man in the place, and so I decided to high-tail it out and exit stage left before these surly-looking braceros and maquiladora workers decided to carve their initials on my spleen. Determined not to leave the drink unfinished, I downed it and exited the pulqueria - then I went to my motel and was up with pulqueria all night.

There was a painting of a nude woman on the wall behind the bartender, lounging proudly on a red bed. I can still see it clearly etched in my mind after all this time. Years later, during a nude photography session, I would take a photo of Erica in an identical pose, unintentionally, and only upon seeing the photo did I realize it was exactly like the painting - down to every last detail. But then I came to understand it was weirder than that - the painting didn't just look like Erica, the painting was Erica. Even though I was in Mexico before she was born, and the painting may have been made even before I was born.

Many, many years later, to my shock, a band called Deadbolt recorded a story-song called "It Was You" that basically tells this exact same incident right down to being set in Juarez, even. Convinced that some powerful forces were indeed at play here, I subsequently did my part to play ball with this conspiracy and worked the incident into my novel The Invisible Ranch.

Dreams of the pulqueria, and of the painting, still recur to this day. In some of them I am welcomed as a friend and a regular, in others I am, more realistically, fighting for my life. In still others, I am not myself but some other person, and watching the events from a distance as if watching a film. From my dreamer's perspective I try to influence the me-but-not-me person and get them to get the hell out of there while he still can. In these dreams, I am fully aware that I am dreaming, and my perspective keeps shifting from myself sleeping in bed to the me-but-not-me guy in the dream.

The moral of all this might be that Mezcal is powerful stuff. Tread lightly upon its footpath.

---

There's an outdoor nut vendor and I consider buying some cashews. The man is cleancut and smiling. I look down at the cashews, pondering my purchase. I look up at the man and he suddenly is groteque-looking and covered in filth. I look down at the cashews again and they are also now rotting and moldy. He yells something rude as I walk away.

---

Walking past the living room and I notice there is a sizable group of people on my front porch, all peering in the window. They get excited as I come closer, and they jump up and down with glee, pointing their cellphones at me. I open the door and greet them with a bemused grin and a haughty "Yes?"

Everyone starts talking at once. The group is a mix of all ages, from the elderly to elementary schoolers. From their wall of jabber I begin to glean that they are players of an online scavenger-hunt game not unlike Pokémon Go, except the sole purpose of this game is to lead people to my house. I woke up bounding forward like Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo, hugely relieved to find it was only a dream.

---

Two of the very earliest dreams I can remember having: one was literally as a baby in the playpen, barely able to walk, and by now my rememberings of it are actually duplications of my teenage self remembering my toddler self remembering it. Nevertheless, as I had photographic memory back then, it's still vivid today. It was the sort of dream you might expect a baby to have: I was toddling on uncertain legs in my baby shoes along a giant bridge that was, yes, a rainbow, leading across a vast chasm under surreal pinkish skies. My parents were with me, but suddenly they disappeared and I went into a blind panic. A giant monster, something like a prehistoric Styracosaurus, blocked my path ahead. I heard a woman's voice, not my mother's, reassuring everything was fine. The monster turned and fled. This may, in fact, be a proto-Angela dream.

The other dream was a while later. I was probably five. I ran out in front of a school bus and was hit by it. My field of vision became like a dirty parchment with a dim bug-bulb shining through it from the other side, and I could hear other people and children chattering around me, but it was muffled, echoey, and indiscernable, as if underwater, or a cliched cinematic effect signifying half-consciousness.

Another female voice, again possibly an early "precovery" appearance of Angela, suddenly spoke clearly in my head. She uttered a phrase I would, thirty years later, hear on a Dean Martin record which became one of me and Dockery's private in-jokes. She said, "Find me."

---

Tuesday, March 28, 2017

Communication Lag

I've been fiddling around with the final-final-final draft of my science fiction opus, Solar Station A, and I have to confess it makes me more than a little sad to see the process of this particular volume come to a close.

That's because Solar Station A has gained something of a mythical status as being my "Chinese Democracy" - that ill-fated Guns N' Roses album which the band began recording in 1984 and didn't finish until a month away from the year 2009. Along that crazy-path the album took, there was much buildup, hype, fanfare, drama, and constant band lineup changes. (And of course, in the end, the album pretty much sucked and disappointed everyone.)

Solar Station A began its fermentation from the very start of the JSH Book Club. In 2011, I made a list of the pulp-fiction genres I wanted the first six books to represent - hard-boiled detective, American pioneer, western, war, science fiction, and pirate. (I have successfully ticked all these off the list except the war novel, and you may in fact be pleased to know that I currently do not have one planned.) I knew very early on what the title was - I didn't know why, I just liked the sound of it.

Soon a very rudimentary outline was formed, which was that a new scientific innovation has suddenly allowed ordinary citizens to zip around the solar system in spaceships of their own. But when they get out there, they discover that... well, let's leave it that. The lead was a mild-mannered guy who is appalled to learn that most of the people colonizing space are the same sort of rude people he'd hoped to escape by leaving Earth.

I was certain enough about the book's forward motion to include a brief synopsis of it in a "Coming Soon" section of The Moleskin Checklist, written in 2012 and published on January 1, 2013. Another book that didn't yet exist, The Bartender, was listed alongside it. That book made it to press; the other lingered, simmered, steeped.

Throughout the summer of 2013, I spoke often of the "final draft" of it being in the works, and coming "by summer's end", and then "by year's end." It never appeared. I am almost always late on deadlines, so it didn't seem too unseemly at this point. But by 2014, I had ceased talking about it entirely. And by 2015, it was becoming something of a joke, with only an occasional mention of it coming out "someday, maybe, I dunno."

Then, two things occurred that acted as catalysts: One, I made the decision to change the lead character from a man to a woman. Suddenly the writing flowed with this alteration and seemed, to me anyway, to be a major improvement of the story. Some people will inevitably say I don't know how to write a female character, and to them I will inevitably say, "go suck an egg."

The other factor was something that no one, myself included, could have foreseen in 2012: the election of Donald Trump. Since Solar Station A takes place in the very-near future, my idea of this fictional universe's history would be dramatically different than what I'd first envisioned. Giving the book a dystopian dose of Trump added some fuel to my fire to complete the damn thing and get it over with once and for all.

The curse hasn't stopped there, though. I originally announced the book would finally appear in January, then February, then March, and now it's pretty darn clear I'm gonna miss that deadline too. But we're close. Real close. Close enough to smell it. Why, I'm even tweeting teaser excerpts and everything. The coffee mugs and t-shirts can't be far behind now, right?

But will the book be any good? Oh, well....you know. It's pulp fiction, baby, short, sweet, and sassy. Wham, bam, thank you ma'am. It ain't Dostoyevsky but hey, what is? Besides Dostoyevsky, I mean. Buy it when it comes out and give it scathing reviews!

(Meanwhile, I've already turned my attention down the road to the next books: the also hanging-in-limbo publication of my dream journals, called Transmissions From Agent J, my "Great American Werewolf Novel", Undomesticated, and a peculiar little number about an 18th-century actress called Matilda Heron.)

Friday, October 30, 2015

Excerpt from "The Tract of Blood"

An excerpt here follows from the forthcoming JSH Book Club novel The Tract of Blood. It's a sequel to The Moleskin Checklist, in which Jack has become a compulsive gambler and golf club hustler in an Arizona resort town. Jack is traumatized by the theft of his precious "Tract of Blood" notebook. Sappy and his mysterious new exotic mail-order girlfriend aid Jack's quest to get it back, whether he wants their help or not. The book is part of my return to the long-form novel, which I've not assayed since my first opus, 714.

Like The Moleskin Checklist, the sequel is atypical JSH fare: it's full of sex, violence, grossness, and bad, bad, talk. You were warned.


We were led through a pitch black corridor into a room. As we were hurriedly pushed in, I heard the colossal scraping sound of an immense metal door sliding open, then shut behind us, followed by the clanking sounds of it being locked.

"Sit tight," one of them said. "Someone will be here in the morning to deal with you."

Immediately we felt insects crawling all over us. Flies. The room stank like death. Probably a good thing we couldn't see what was causing the stink.

And then Jack fired up his lighter. Thanks, Jack, I really didn't want to know.

We were in some kind of steel chamber painted in corroding off-white latex, with bloodstains all over the floor and walls. This must have been the place they slaughtered the livestock.

"I shoulda quit you baby, long time ago," mumbled Jack, "and went on to Mexico."

"What?"

""Killing Floor". Howlin' Wolf. 1964."

"Whatever."

"Okay, these flies are disgusting and they're driving me insane!" exclaimed Alhena.

The flies were desperate. They'd already just about exhausted the filth potential of the decaying blood, and we were the fresh meat. I swept my hand over my nose, as flies kept crawling into it. I looked over at Alhena. She was so covered in them. She'd wave a hand and they'd disperse for half a second before landing right back on her. Some stayed clinging to her the whole time. Reminded me of the cows on the farm growing up, and the futility of their tails trying to flip the flies away.

There was a moment of darkness as Jack's lighter got too hot in his hands, then he relit it. His face was covered in flies too. Alhena was having fits.

I knew what I had to do.

"Don't look, kids."

Resolutely I strode to the far corner of the room, pulled my pants down, and opened the floodgates on the diarrhea that was longing to breathe.

"SAPPY!" cried Alhena in disbelief.

"Awwww, no, Sappy! No!" said Jack weakly. "Aw, Jesus."

Like a Sumo wrestler, I walked forward while squatting, making sure I spread my mess across the floor's length along one wall.

"What the fuck, Sappy? Like it didn't already stink enough in here," said Jack. He kept staring at me, though, and kept the lighter held up, which I found kinda uncomfortable. Alhena just stood quietly and began to nod knowingly.

"There," I said, wiping my ass with a grocery receipt from my pocket. "Now stand back, watch and learn."

Within ten seconds, every fly in the room had left us and was completely preoccupied with my power-dump.

Jack chuckled. That weird, high-pitched nervous laugh of his.

"Shall we start the staff meeting now?" I said. "First order of business on the agenda, getting the fuck out of here."

Jack kept looking up at the ceiling like he was sure an exit was that way. Alhena was examining the hinges of the door. "Bring that light over here," she barked, and Jack meekly complied.

"These are small hinges for such a heavy door," she mused. "but we know the door has a huge sliding bolt on the other side. No good."

"What's Flimsy's number?" I asked, pulling out my phone. Jack told me. The phone struggled hard to get a signal, but ultimately it failed. Jack and Alhena tried too. Fail.

"I wonder how many animals have died a horrible violent death right here where we're standing," said Jack.

"Hundreds of thousands," Alhena proclaimed, as if she knew it for a firsthand fact.

"Their ghosts are probably lingering right here."

"There's no such thing as ghosts," she said. "Animals don't have souls anyway."

"But... in the casino you mentioned evil spirits."

"Spirits are not ghosts," she replied, looking at Jack as if he were a child. "There are spirits out there, but they are not the souls of dead humans. They were created before mankind."

"Hey," I interrupted, "When you bitches get done with this metaphysical argument, I have a plan."

"Your plans always suck," moaned Jack, as he let go of the lighter button again. Our phones were now illuminating the room a little bit anyway.

"Yeah, but they work, don't they? Let's give Alhena all our phones," I said, handing her mine. "Now, I'll get on Jack's shoulders, and Alhena can climb up to get on mine."

"Why?"

"To see if we can get a better call signal."

Jack sighed as he handed over his phone. It took several minutes and several tries, but eventually we succeeded in creating a human totem pole. Although it wavered and swayed like a palm tree in a hurricane.

"Straighten up! Straighten up!" yelled Alhena.

"I'm not really built for this," yelled Jack back. "And Sappy? You didn't wipe your ass good enough."

"All I had was a Whole Foods receipt," I said, "whaddaya want? I'm risking getting cancer of the ass here from all the chemical shit they put in those receipts."

"I think their receipts are BPA-free now, actually," said Alhena. She's sharp, boy, I tell ya.

"I'm not getting a signal," she said. "Move over that way."

"What way?"

"Any way."

"What are you going to say if you do get through to 911?" asked Jack.

"I'm calling Flimsy, not 911," she yelled. "The last thing we need right now are cops involved in this." I love her.

She tried Jack's phone first because it had Flimsy's number programmed in. I watched her face, dimly illuminated by the phone.

"Not getting a signal," she murmured.

Then she had to do some juggling to enter Flimsy's number on her own phone while still holding Jack's up to see the number. She twisted her body around on my shoulders, watching for a signal.

"We're in!" she exclaimed, like a computer hacker in some movie. "It's weak, but I have a connection."

I could hear the ring of the phone as we all waited. No answer. No voicemail. She dialed again.

I heard a muffled "hello?"

"*Flimsy!* This is Alhena; you just met us at the casino? Girl, we need your help big time. These weirdos locked us in a meat locker in Freberg's meat packing plant. Yeah. I'm serious. Do you know where that is? Okay. Yeah. Well, the front glass door is smashed in, so just be careful entering. Yeah. It's a long story. Okay, when you get in, you go right, then turn left down a long corridor, there's a giant wall-size mural of a happy pig in a chef's outfit holding a cleaver. I know, right? Anyway, go down that corridor and make a right. It's a big metal door with a bar that slides to hold the door shut. Okay. Thankyouthankyouthankyou. Okay. See you soon."

It was perfect timing for her call to end, because that's when Jack's legs gave out. The human totem pole came tumbling down. I landed hard on my hands and knees, and somehow Alhena landed right on her feet, like a cat.

"Sorry," mumbled Jack. Alhena responded with something in her own language that probably translated to "dumbass."

So we sat on the filthy floor, against the wall farthest from my diarrhea, waiting to be rescued. We talked and talked, about movies, music, politics, golf, wrestling, video games, and how hard it is to find a good Philly cheesesteak in Arizona. We'd gone just about stir-crazy by the time we heard Flimsy at the door, an hour and a half later.

"Oh. My. God." hissed Flimsy, recoiling from the smell. I guess we'd gotten used to it. We explained the whole thing to Flimsy, who provided us with something we didn't know: the Freberg meat packing plant hadn't been in businesss for over a decade.

"That blood in there is not a decade old," said Jack, "and obviously, neither are the flies."

"Most likely human," said Alhena, "and our blood would have been next to spill in the morning."

Monday, May 4, 2015

Flinging Soup in the Face of Darkness

Only a month after the advent of the first in the RV & OI series, now comes the second installment: Flinging Soup in the Face of Darkness is now available. Like all the RV & OI books, it's print-edition only, each copy primitively handmade, and obtainable only by ordering direct from JSH Book Club.

As I've explained elsewhere, it's difficult to give a plot rundown for the RV & OI novellas, because they're more about texture than story arc. It would be a little like reading a Seinfeld plot summary, i.e. "George thinks about buying a hat. Elaine is convinced she's allergic to water. Kramer invents edible socks."

I will say that whereas Water Towers Look Like Martians tends to focus on RV & OI's street-busking performances (and all the angst that comes with trying to do it in a small town), Flinging Soup in the Face of Darkness tends to delve more into the recording process of their low-budget albums, and the desperation of sending out to the world a beacon, a signal, a cry for help via the random dissemination of cassette tapes whose inscrutable message is practically unlistenable for nine tenths of the general public.

The real RV & OI (yes, these books are based on a true story) are well known for their made-up-on-the-spot primitive contributions to the noble tradition of "Creeps Music", and are often seen to this day loitering around the state of Kentucky reading Gold Key comics, drinking household cleaning products, and serenading local pizza joints for free food. All RV&OI recordings are done on the world's crummiest handheld tape recorder, and their cassette-only albums are "released" in short homemade runs and usually left at bus stops, phone booths, and public restrooms. It is in that spirit that I've chosen to make these paperbacks by hand, making each copy an unique, if crudely fashioned, objet d'art.

Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Excerpt from "Water Towers Look Like Martians"

As the summer sun beat down, OI sat in the grass and pounded the stolen plastic mail crate as if his life depended on it. He played with a savage frenzy that did not pause to consider melody, meter, or timekeeping. Possession of the mail crate was a Federal offense, but the power of rock and roll would not, could not, be denied. For drumsticks, he used the cardboard cores from rolls of fax paper, and upon his head rested a tamborine that he would bash for percussion at random moments. Sometimes he would miss and bash himself in the face. But how rock and roll is *that*?

RV was jumping up and down on the campus sidewalk and flailing at an electric guitar with such zeal it didn't even matter that it was missing two strings and not plugged into an amp. With much pomp and theatrics, he brought the cover of Prince's "Let's Go Crazy" (but with numerous lines changed to reflect various private in-jokes about people they had gone to high school with) to a halt.

"Thank you, ladies and gentlemen! Thank you! WE LOVE YOU! GOODNIGHT!"

Silence.

There was, in truth, no audience, and it was, in fact, midday.

"Good show," OI said as he got up and turned the tape recorder off. "I think that Gordon Lightfoot medley we did is a keeper. How much money did we make?"

"Let me see," said RV, reaching into his hat on the ground. "looks like..... eighty-seven cents."

"What should we do now?"

"Let's get a Sprite."

RV had an encyclopedic knowledge of every source for soda and snacks in a fifty mile radius, and he knew that the closest source at this moment was the EKU Coliseum. He also kept exhaustive files on every public restroom in central Kentucky, and planned eventually to write a book (called You Are Never Far From A Bathroom) listing and reviewing them all, with an additional appendix in the back detailing sneaky places where you could safely go if you couldn't get to the nearest public restroom in time.

But at the Coliseum, The little orange light on the Sprite button was on, indicating it was out of Sprite. OI stared at the remaining options, trying to decide between a Coke and a Canada Dry Ginger Ale, as RV laid down his guitar and slumped to the floor, head in hands, suddenly deeply depressed.

"C'mon, big guy," said OI as he dropped coins into the machine. "There'll be other Sprites."

"My life has no meaning."

"Huh?"

"The emptiness of the Sprite section of the Coke machine is a metaphor for the barrenness of my heart in old age, with the orange light symbolizing the dim flame of now-painful memories of lost childhood joys."

"Gosh."

"Do you understand what I mean?"

"Yep. Totally." OI's Coke loudly plunked into the bottom of the machine. "Errrrm...... what's a metaphor?"

The sound of the crackle and hiss of a campus cop's walkie-talkie was heard down the hall, accompanying some authoritative footsteps.

"Let's go," whispered OI, grabbing his precious mail crate.

"Cops can suck my LEG!" yelled RV rebelliously after they got outside, then looked around to make there wasn't one nearby.

"Should we find another machine with Sprite?" asked OI.

"Nah. Forget it. I hate Sprite anyway."

"But you drink it all the time."

"Suffering builds character."

"So what now?"

"I think," said RV slowly, moving his head jerkily but purposefully, as if it were a dowsing rod detecting something, "I want beer."

Though RV kept no files on the matter, it was a fact that in Richmond you are never far from a beer. Richmond is a very alcoholic town, which comes in handy if you are an alcoholic, or an alcoholic's apprentice. Everyone drinks here. The young. The old. Bikers. Businessmen. Campus cops. Why this is so, nobody seems to know. There is a military installation nearby that is said to be one of the two largest storage places for nerve gas, enough to kill a third of the country, or at least Kentucky. The nerve gas canisters are all very old and very leaky. Sometimes orange clouds come wafting out of the base and birds fall from the sky, but the Army says people are just being hysterical and it was just an ordinary run-of-the-mill harmless orange cloud and who cares about birds anyhow? Others say the Roswell UFO pieces and alien bodies are stored here. All of this is certainly enough to make people want to stay drunk all the time.