Clevenger's second novel (after 2002's The Contortionist's Handbook) opens with a classic grabber: an amnesiac man awakes in jail with a woman's name-Desiree-on his lips. Prodded by a pushy police detective, that man (his name is Eric Ashworth, he's told) must sift through the contents of his drug-addled brain to explain his only memory: "A ball of fire rising from a flaming house. Nails melting like slivers of silent wax. Beams and shingles collapsing into a pile of burning dust...." Released on bail, Eric checks into a flophouse and attempts to separate his ongoing drug hallucinations from reality. To aid him in this quest he turns to the doubtful promise of yet another drug, a powerful hallucinogen known on the street as Skin, Cradle or Derma. Eric's trip toward understanding, as well as the reader's, twists through exotic visions that may or not be real. It's a long, painful process, but eventually Eric puts it all together and learns who he is-and the terrible thing that he's done. This is a sometimes brilliant, heavily stylized novel whose psychedelic prose and labyrinthine story line will enthrall some readers and enrage others. At one point Clevenger counsels both Eric and the reader: "Anything is possible and nothing is possible. They're the same thing." Yes, that's it exactly. (Oct.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Bailed out of jail and holed up in a low-rent motel, amnesiac Eric Ashworth has only the memory of a woman's name: Desiree. With steadily increasing doses of a strange new hallucinogen, Ashworth finds that the drug allows him to reassemble his past in broken fragments. But as he begins to lose touch with the present, his distinction between truth and fantasy begins to crumble, creating a world where divisions between love and loss, violence and tenderness, and fact and fiction are less discernible than they ought to be.
Bailed out of jail and holed up in a low-rent motel, amnesiac Eric Ashworth has only the memory of a woman's name: Desiree. With steadily increasing doses of a strange new hallucinogen, Ashworth finds that the drug allows him to reassemble his past in broken fragments. But as he begins to lose touch with the present, his distinction between truth and fantasy begins to crumble, creating a world where divisions between love and loss, violence and tenderness, and fact and fiction are less discernible than they ought to be.
Dermaphoria
Narrated by Craig Clevenger
Craig ClevengerUnabridged — 5 hours, 59 minutes
Dermaphoria
Narrated by Craig Clevenger
Craig ClevengerUnabridged — 5 hours, 59 minutes
Overview
Bailed out of jail and holed up in a low-rent motel, amnesiac Eric Ashworth has only the memory of a woman's name: Desiree. With steadily increasing doses of a strange new hallucinogen, Ashworth finds that the drug allows him to reassemble his past in broken fragments. But as he begins to lose touch with the present, his distinction between truth and fantasy begins to crumble, creating a world where divisions between love and loss, violence and tenderness, and fact and fiction are less discernible than they ought to be.
Editorial Reviews
Gonzo, wired psychodrama from Clevenger (The Contortionist's Handbook, 2002), who splices and reshuffles reality in prose that reads like something ripped screaming straight out of the unconscious. The story starts inside the head of the extremely disturbed and confused Eric Ashworth, who's trying to piece together exactly why and how in the hell he ended up where he is. At the moment, wrists and feet cuffed to a chair, he's being interrogated by a testy police detective and his defense attorney, neither of whom Ashworth's convinced are quite human. He can tell they're quickly running out of patience with him, perhaps understandably, since he's constantly hallucinating and drifting in and out of fugue states. Out on bail, Ashworth checks into a fleabag hotel that could have dropped straight out of a William Vollman novel and begins to get bits of his memory back. He's helped, sort of, by the appearance of one Manhattan White, who claims to be an old associate, and psychopathic henchman Toe Tag, described by Ashwort as, "Goddamned Boo Radley with a chloroform rag and a bone saw." It seems that at some point in the near past, Ashworth was the evil-scientist nerve center for a network of drug labs strung all over the Southwest, constantly synthesizing new drug compounds for all the designer junkies with the attention spans of mayflies. But then the whole operation went up in flames, and Ashworth's memory gets a bit cloudy after that. Cutting through the buckshot randomness of his recollections, he can at least pick out the girl he must have been in love with: Desiree, whose name "numbs me like an animal dart and drops my thoughts in their tracks."Gloriously shifty puzzle-fiction whoseresolution is much less important than the kaleidoscopic journey towards it.
Whip-crack visuals and cinematic editing…It’s Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream by way of latter-day Cormac McCarthy.”
Clevenger’s trademark voice and pace are as good as ever, but the settings are his greatest triumph.”
Dermaphoria advances Clevenger’s dark art, powerfully evoking the paranoia of a man attempting to reconstruct his life.”
Reminiscent of William Gibson’s work, but Clevenger has his own attitude and a film-noirish literary style that is unique.”
Cleverly obtuse…Offers a full ration of contemporary grit for those who prefer their noir with a high intelligence quotient.”
Praise for Craig Clevenger:
“I swear to God this [The Contortionist’s Handbook] is the best book I have read in easily five years. Easily. Maybe ten years.”
–Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club and Choke
“Clevenger has produced an utterly persuasive and compelling novel, combining the zest and enthusiasm of a new voice with the craft and the guile of a veteran.”
–Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940169807509 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Blackstone Audio, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 01/08/2010 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
Dermaphoria
By Craig Clevenger
MacAdam/Cage Publishing
ISBN: 1-93156-175-3Chapter One
I panicked and swallowed a handful of fireflies and black widows the inferno had not. Shiny glass teardrops shattered between my teeth while the fireflies popped like Christmas bulbs until I coughed up blood and blue sparks, starting another fire three inches behind my eyes and burning a hole through the floor of my memory. A lifetime of days, years, minutes and months, gone, but for a lone scrap, scorched and snagged on a frayed nerve ending and snapping in the breeze:Desiree.
Hard as I try, a given recollection's pictures, sounds and smells, synchronized and ordered first to last, are everything but, swarming back through the cold hole in my brain where they hit the waning light and crackle into smoke. Others wait until dark to show themselves. I can hold a picture's fragments together for a lucid half second before a light shines through my eyes and they scatter, slipping between my brain's blackened cracks. One memory after the next turns yellow at the edges and crumbles to flakes at my touch.
I smell rotted pulp, old newspapers crawling with silverfish, the dank, dissolving bindings of books I don't remember reading. The stench gives me chills that turn to sandpaper on my neck and shoulders. My back burns if I lean the wrong way and I feel bandages but I can't touch them. My wrists and feet are cuffed to a chair in a room built to the stark schematics of my own head. Peeling walls the color of fingernails, cement floor, an overhead light with an orbiting moth. I'm alone with three machines. Two are on pause behind me, a third speaks into a telephone near the door.
"I miss you, Snowflake ... I love you too ... bunches ... bunches and bunches ... yes, Mommy too," his baritone whisper like the rumble of a distant train.
The machines are good. Whoever made them has all of my respect. Stunning detail in their faces, each loaded with a databank of behaviors for random interval display, all manner of mannerisms from coughs to sniffs, synthetic-cartilage knuckle cracks, biting lips and picking nails. The odor of static, the electric smell from a bank of new television sets gives them away.
"When I get home ... okay, I will. Love you ... bye bye, Snowflake." Faint dial tone, the ping ping of the doomed but determined moth against the lightbulb, then the machine sits in front of me.
"My daughter's been sick and I've been on overtime." He speaks to me as though I'm a sleeping child and he's about to kiss my forehead. He slides a cigarette from a pack with gold foil and some French name I can't pronounce.
"Haven't seen her for three days." The snap of his chrome lighter chimes like a coin hitting the pavement. "You smoke?"
He's engineered for sincerity and affection. The two behind me hide their eyes behind dark glasses, but his are exposed and big, liquid brown, radiating trust along with his voice. He wears an oiled-back, matinee-idol haircut and a tailored suit the deep blue of beetle wings and from across the table my eyes can feel the fabric, soft as a baby bird's throat. He's wired to smell like breath mints, cigarettes and expensive aftershave.
A tentacle of smoke gathers into a cloud overhead. It dissolves in the air between us and the smell stings my nose.
"No." Conscious of my manners with him, I correct myself. "No. Thanks."
"I wasn't offering. Word is you can't remember to chew before you swallow. I'm just seeing for myself. How 'bout it? You remember smoking? Maybe falling asleep after a few drags?"
Shaking my head hurts, pulls at my skin.
"You did it on purpose. Covering your tracks?"
His circuits pause midbreath. The smoke above freezes into a ball of cobwebs. The moth is eavesdropping and I can hear the blood moving through my ears.
"You have any idea why you're talking to me?"
"Pieces of an idea." My blood beats louder and I think I'm going to be sick, "Who are you?"
"My name is Detective Nicholas Anslinger."
The slack in my chains is barely enough for me to reach his outstretched hand, sheathed in a synthetic polymer, mimicking my own skin.
"You can call me Detective," he continues. "Tell me these pieces."
I remember fire, but not starting one.
"I can't remember," he says. "I've heard this before." His brown eyes don't blink. They stay locked onto me. The damp draft unfurls a ribbon of cigarette smoke and coils it around my face.
"Let's start with the spiders. How many have you made and how many are still out there?"
Which is stranger, that Anslinger thinks I'm God or that he can chain God to a wheelchair beneath a spotlight?
"Try this," he says, leaning forward, "we found the galaxy."
He's right, I am God. It's all coming back to me. Darkness and light, floods, seven days and angels feuding amongst themselves for my favor. I lost my temper and the firestorm killed my precious dinosaurs. Work it out, learn to compromise, I told them. After the platypus, I disbanded the committee and stayed solo. This created resentment, a permanent rift in the organization.
Anslinger reads from a notebook, "1964 Ford, two-door, hardtop, candy apple red Galaxie 500, registered to one Eric Ashworth. Fully restored, if you don't count the blown back windshield and scorched paint." He snaps the notebook shut. "Nice ride."
I'm not God. I'm Eric Ashworth. It's all coming back to me.
No, it's not.
My head goes dark so the bugs will come crawling out. I squint through the blackness. I remember the sound of God cracking open the sky and shaking the earth. A ball of fire rising from a flaming house. Nails melting like slivers of silver wax. Beams and shingles collapsing into a pile of burning dust and the earth spitting them into the air. The angry fire boulder rolls down from the sky toward me. I run, choking back the spiders and fireflies fighting their way up my throat. More bugs will drop from the air at any second. Armored insects with polished, carbon fiber heads, giant eyes that shine like black mercury and can see in the dark.
A phone booth surrounded by nothing, and beyond the nothing, darkness. An invisible swarm burrows into my back, chewing through my skin as I call for help from the phone in the middle of nowhere. A light hits me from behind. I turn, face to face with a six-foot storm trooper mantis covered in armor plating, locked onto me with black goggle eyes. I crush it with the heavy plastic receiver before it eats my head and learns everything I know.
As little sense as this makes to Anslinger, it makes less to me.
"Your car was the only vehicle parked outside that house, of which there is nothing left. You assaulted the state trooper who found you at an abandoned gas station talking into a dead telephone. You were about an hour on foot from the burn site. The middle of the night, you could have died of exposure."
"I killed a bug." The bandages burn, my mind's eye sees a stretch of oily black blisters and the healthy skin peeling back like the paint on these walls.
Pieces come together. Okay, I've got it. They crumble apart. I move my thumb, then try to remember moving my thumb. Got it again. Play each preceding second one by one. Whole minutes, chunks of hours follow suit, binding to the fresh fragile moment before until the sequence holds.
My feet and wrists strapped to a bed frame surrounded by bags, tubes and beeping boxes. A machine dressed in white lets me suck on ice chips and says I'm going to be okay. They cut skin from my legs and sewed it onto my back, he says. Another machine in white asks me questions and shows me photographs so I can make up stories for them. I draw pictures, work puzzles and piss into cups. The machine gives me a notebook. Writing things down will help my memory. The first machine slides a syringe into one of the tubes. I follow the surge of liquid down to the crook of my elbow but nothing's there but a wad of cotton held with tape, my hands cuffed below a metal table and Anslinger sitting across from me.
My brain tries to kick-fire itself into working again. Nanostorm lightning burns the memory nest to a cinder, the drones thrown to their backs, legs kicking the air.
"This is the part where we sweat you, tag team good cop, bad cop," Anslinger says. "Those are the rules, right? Not my style. You're not in good shape. You rest for a while and we'll talk again."
Anslinger grinds out his cigarette.
"I've been looking for you, or someone like you, for some time. Beginning to think you were an urban legend. Don't take this the wrong way, but it's good to finally meet you."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Dermaphoria by Craig Clevenger Excerpted by permission.
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