Zanesville

Zanesville

by Kris Saknussemm
Zanesville

Zanesville

by Kris Saknussemm

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Overview

WHO IS ELIJAH CLEARFATHER?

Futuristic bioweapon or good old-fashioned messiah? Reincarnated ex-porn star or mutant information-age revolutionary? The man who awakens in New York City’s Central Park with no memory of his identity and the enigmatic message FATHER FORGIVE THEM F carved into the flesh of his back may be all of these things and more.

Taken in (and then expelled) by a group of freedom fighters battling the soul-deadening Vitessa Cultporation, Clearfather is a stranger in an even stranger land. Following tantalizing clues that point to the gnomic Stinky Wiggler, and pursued by murderous Vitessa agents, Clearfather embarks on a surreal odyssey of self-discovery across an America that resembles a vast amusement park designed by some unholy trinity of Walt Disney, Hunter S. Thompson, and Hieronymus Bosch.

Accompanying Clearfather is an unforgettable cast of characters–including Aretha Nightingale, an ex-football-playing drag queen; Dooley Duck and Ubba Dubba, hologram cartoon characters sprung outrageously to life; and the ethereally beautiful Kokomo, whose past is as much a mystery as Clearfather’s own.

By turns hilarious and deeply moving, a savage, fiercely intelligent satire that is also a page-turning adventure and a transcendent love story, Zanesville marks the arrival of a brilliant new voice in fiction.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781588365019
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 10/11/2005
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 496
File size: 612 KB

About the Author

Kris Saknussemm was born and educated in America and had a predictable range of odd jobs in his youth: factory worker, forklift driver, hospital orderly, counselor at a camp for the blind and the circulation manager for an adult newspaper. For most of his mature life he has lived abroad, primarily in Australia.

Following an aborted doctorate program in the History and Philosophy of Science, he turned to the study of anthropology, studying the Cargo Cult religions of Melanesia. As the result of an hallucinogenic experience on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu, he came to the conclusion that he did not sufficiently understand the role religion played in his own culture to be credibly investigating and analyzing the beliefs of another, and so abandoned academia.

He turned to advertising and mass communications for a living, while continuing to write fiction and poetry. Founder of the guerilla theater group called the False Frontier Society, he staged a series of “resurrection performances” in derelict industrial sites in Melbourne and Sydney, until a near fall from scaffolding almost claimed his life.

He now divides his time between a rural property in the old goldfields region outside Melbourne and the West Coast of America. A painter and sculptor as well as writer, he has been a resident at the MacDowell Colony and is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Zanesville is his first novel and the first in a proposed series of works he calls The Lodemania Testament.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1



He crashed back into himself and felt the Easter evening damp. Dolls and chains hung in ritual fashion from the branches surrounding him, and through the knife-hacked oak trees he could make out great luminous spires and domes, and older, grim, but luxuriant blocks of apartments sealed with steel-plate louvers as if against attack. Beside these rose skeletal scaffoldings on which, judging from the hives of lights, whole families perched on open-air platforms while resourceful or desperate individuals dangled in slings and sacks suspended from guy wires. Across the sky, as though projected from behind the sulfur-tinged clouds, flashed pictograms and iridescent banks of hypertext. The word vitessawas repeated often . . . and slogans like efram-zev . . . the right mood at the right time.He felt hypnotized by the messages, information raining down like some new kind of radiation. Then there were streams of news images and giant flickering headlines . . . al-waqi‘a still a threat . . . voyancy links now halfprice. . . He’d been standing there for a long time, he thought, having woken suddenly by the fountain, amazed to find that his hair was long and so blond it almost seemed to glow in the dark.

It reminded him of a childhood story but he couldn’t pin it down. Then he realized that of much greater concern was that he couldn’t remember where he was. It was a park of some kind, a vast shadowy garden in some siren-filled city. But which one? He heard a voice . . . garbled and yet unnaturally clear, seeming to come from inside his head. I’ll take Manhattan. It was a man’s voice, both far away and far too close. What did that mean . . . to takeManhattan? He tried to shake himself out of his haze. Something terrible had happened. Drugs, head injury. “I don’t remember my name!” he said aloud, and felt his heart pound at the implication. Even his clothes seemed strange . . . navy cotton drawstring pants, Guatemalan slip-ons, a T-shirt that said i’ve been to wall drug, and a cream-colored windbreaker with a logo on the chest that showed a wheelbarrow with flames rising out of it.

Judging from the grime and odor he might have been sleeping in the bushes for several nights. But Manhattan meant New York, that much he did think was right. Was that where he was? All he could bring to mind was waking with a start with some intuition of danger. Then he heard what he couldn’t decide was the same voice or another and glanced around frantically. It said, For I came down from heaven, not to do mine will, but the will of him who sent me. Shit, he thought. I’m hallucinating. Then a sudden deep sense of alarm brought his whole being alive. There was another sound in the outer darkness. Someone or something was approaching. Seeking him out. Clip clopcame the echoes that his hyperanxious ears filtered out . . . from the tunnel. He hid behind the bushes behind the fountain. His vision seemed to blur and his head filled with static. He waited, muscles cramping. Out of the black maw they emerged at last, one on a large chestnut horse, the other on a bay. The horses were shielded with synthetic face and chestplates, while the riders wore old-fashioned NYPD uniforms. When the figures stopped, he could see that they didn’t have faces. Just flat sheets with scanner slits. Up close, in the sodium lights, the scan masks were scraped and cloudy.

From the south came bursts of gunfire and thudding low-frequency music, but here it was quiet enough to hear their echolocation sonar. His heart bounced as he smelled the tense, strangely sweet animal scent of the horses. At last a flare of static passed between the two mounted shapes. Then, just as they’d appeared, they moved on, the horses’ hooves striking the asphalt with a timeless Roman rhythm, their imposing silhouettes fading into the trees. The moment they were past, from behind one of the spraypainted boulders, a figure wrapped in matte-black cable tape wearing an NV helmet leapt out. “Yer ass is lucky,” the shadow said, grabbing one of his hands in a neoprene fighting glove—weaving through a labyrinth of stripped cars and barbed-wire effigies. They looked like origami contrasted with the turrets rising above the park, armorguard facets gleaming like reptilian crystals. “Hurry,” his guide called out. “Meter says you gonna have a meltdown.” The darkness became a membrane of endlessly falling slowmotion snow, only the flakes were like glass faces, painfully intricate but beautiful to behold. “This way!” the figure called, and it was like stepping through a wall of cool white light.

Suddenly, all around were people. He felt a dart of warmth hit his arm. Then he fell, and he seemed to keep falling, or rising, as if he’d been taken up inside a whirlwind, faces and disintegrated memories orbiting around him. A whirlwind,he remembered. I came here by whirlwind. When at last the spinning stopped, the bodies and the faces had stabilized, and standing over him was a large black woman who, as his eyes began to focus, he came to see was in fact a man, wearing makeup, an aqua wig, and a long African-style robe over sheepskin boots from which a Beretta Cheetah was just visible. “We’ve given you some ZENO,” the vision informed him. “Try not to move fast.”

He was lying in a tent on an old cot. Candles glowed. Through a gelpane window he could see people passing between radomes and tepees. He heard an accordion and smelled marsala. Sparks rose from oil drums.
“Yo,” a voice behind him said, and he saw it was the tape-mailed figure who’d found him minus the night-vision helmet—a Puerto Rican girl of about sixteen with a pigskin face graft that suggested a dark market burn ward.
“Who are you?” the large black woman/man asked.

He tried to focus. He couldn’t get over his long blond hair. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him and yet for all the hardness of muscle, his skin was smooth. Except for the terrible burning he felt now on his back. That’s what made me black out, he realized. Pain. Pain from the skin of my back. There was something there but he couldn’t bring himself to think of it. Voices rustled in his brain . . . Last hope . . . Psyche War. . . beneath the sadness of a blues guitar drifting in on the night wind from somewhere far away—or deeper inside himself.

“Do you know who you are?” the large black woman/man repeated, but he couldn’t answer.

Who were these people and what did they want? Where had he been going when he fell out of the whirlwind? To meet someone, he thought. To find someone. There’s somewhere I have to be. There’s someone I have to be.

“That’s all right,” the dark-skinned giant said.
“Let’s start with where you are. You’re in New York City. In a part of Central Park that no one but us knows exists. We call it Fort Thoreau. It’s a kind of sanctuary. We refer to ourselves as the Satyagrahi, and I’m Aretha Nightingale.”

So saying, the speaker brought over a psykter of purified water and poured a cup for him, carefully considering the man’s whiteblond hair and tomorrow-staring eyes. There was something intriguingly familiar and at the same time deeply foreign about this night visitor. He was of average height and certainly less than average weight, but he radiated a presence that filled the tent.

The man drank some water and said, “You’re a—”
“A drag queen? That’s right, honey, I am!”
In fact the speaker looked like a former linebacker trying very hard to imitate some forgotten disco singer like Donna Summer.
“Used to be a lawyer. Lead counsel for the largest insurance company in the world. Lived a few blocks away. Of course I had to keep my private life secret. Then one day I saw I had to get out of the limo and back behind the mule. But that’s another story. That’s my story. Tinkerbell says the Securitors let you skiddo.”
“Who’s Tinkerbell?’
“Me.”
The PR girl winked, laser-edging a frozen-forged Gerber blade.
“Is someone after you?” Aretha asked, noticing again how long and blond the odd man’s hair was, how outwardly strained and yet internally resilient he appeared. “
I don’t know . . . I can’t . . .” Aretha picked up a detector and ran it over him. The device recorded an electromagnetic disturbance of an unknown kind.
“So do you have any idea who you are?”
“N-no. I . . . don’t . . . ,” the man said, staring around at the walls of the tent, which he saw through the gloom were decorated with chintzy Chinese fans, kimonos, and ostrich feathers.
“And you don’t know how you got here?” Aretha prodded. The blond man thought for a minute. Beyond the crazy idea of falling out of a whirlwind all he remembered was staring at the syringes in the fountain and then being seized with a scorching pain across his back.
“No,” he said finally. “I only remember the things on horses.”
“We’re going to give you a bioscan,” Aretha announced. “The psychometer that Tink had shorted out on you. You had a brainwave reading that we’ve never seen before. Makes Saint Anthony’s Syndrome and Pandora withdrawal look like an attack of the jitters. Is there anything else that comes to mind . . . right this minute?”

Reading Group Guide

1. In Chapter 1 we learn that the protagonist, Clearfather, has the beginning of a quotation carved into his back. What is the significance of this quotation? Is it important this this scarring takes the form of language and do your thoughts about the wound change by the end of the story?

2. We meet several different types of families throughout the course of the book, both literal blood-related families and chosen or accidental families–tribes of circumstance. What are some of the conclusions about the definition of a family offered by the novel? How does the story make you feel about the role and the responsibilities of the individual within a family unit? In your view, which characters behave the most honorably in this regard?

3. Two major questions that contemporary speculative fiction frequently focuses on are What does it mean to be human? and What is real? What kind of answers or suggestions does this story put forward? Is there a link between humanity and reality in the book, and if so, what is it?

4. Each of the major female characters can be said to have a special gift. What are they and how do they influence Clearfather?

5. Dr. Tadd puts forward the argument that trivia is important–that knowing what type of animal a certain cartoon character is may be more significant than it appears. Why does he say this? What role does the exchange of such information play in people’s lives?

6. Dooley Duck tells us there is hope for us all because of what happened to him. Why does he see himself as an inspirational figure?

7. Stinky Wiggler makes the point that Clearfather and Blind Lemon have one major thing in common, which he values above all else. How does Wiggler phrase this characteristic and what do you think he means?

8. Wiggler calls his enemy APPARATUS. How would you describe this adversary? What other names might apply?

9. The novel advances the concept that Ideas are alive, that they are creatures with an independent existence from humans. If you had to defend this proposition, which ideas would you point to?

10. The story tells of both a physical and a psychological/spiritual journey. By the end of the book, what do you think the most important lesson Clearfather has learned? Are the discoveries worth the price? Does he ultimately act wisely or selfishly? Can selfishness ever be wise?

11. Issues for Further Discussion

A. The author Kris Saknussemm has said that he has had two abiding life interests:

The private obsessive theme park-shrines of what are termed “Outsider Artists,” some examples of which are The Ideal Palace of Ferdinand Cheval, Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, Reverend Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden and Leonard Knight’s Salvation Mountain, among many others.

The relationship between Magic, Religion and Science.

How do these two personal fascinations express themselves in Zanesville?

What sort of personal shrines on whatever scale do you know of in your own life? Do you have one, however small–or even secret?

Do you think that we live in an age of Magic, Religion or Science?


B. When asked in an interview what was the seed crystal for writing the book, Saknussemm indicated that it was the following quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your own private heart is true for all men–that is genius.”

Why is this observation both empowering and uplifting and also dangerous and disturbing? It was made a century and a half ago–does it have more or less relevance today?

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