Dermaphoria

published	October 1st 2005 by MacAdam/Cage Publishing
binding	Hardcover
isbn	1931561753 (isbn13: 9781931561754)
ebook
pages	214
description	Bailed out of jail and holed up in a low-rent motel, amnesiac Eric Ashworth's only memory is a woman's name: Desiree. With steadily increasing doses o...more [close] Bailed out of jail and holed up in a low-rent motel, amnesiac Eric Ashworth's only memory is a woman's name: Desiree. With steadily increasing doses of a strange new hallucinogen, Eric 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. [close]
date added	07-19-07 edit book

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Jason rated it:

(review of isbn 1596921021)

08/28/07

Read in August, 2007

(The much longer full review can be found at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:].)

Okay, I confess: that of all the different types of underground artists out there, I have a particular affinity for the weird quiet ones on the edge of every scene, who frequently engage in cutting-edge experiments just for the sake of engaging in them. For example, when I was involved with the performance-poetry community of the 1990s, I tended to spend a lot of time with the p...more (The much longer full review can be found at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:].)

Okay, I confess: that of all the different types of underground artists out there, I have a particular affinity for the weird quiet ones on the edge of every scene, who frequently engage in cutting-edge experiments just for the sake of engaging in them. For example, when I was involved with the performance-poetry community of the 1990s, I tended to spend a lot of time with the people who would drag weird abstract "musical instruments" on stage with them; who would slip the cadences of formal poetry into their work and then not tell anyone, just to see if anyone would notice anyway. And even better, of course, when that artist is quirkily attractive, always jittery in a way that could be innocent or guilty (depending on what substances they've ingested earlier in the evening, I suppose), a literal walking example of what many of us think when we hear the phrase "Life In The Big City."

I just got done with a new book by such an artist, in fact, the profoundly dense and sometimes outright perplexing dermaphoria by San Franciscan Craig Clevenger, whose first novel The Contortionist's Handbook became an accidental sleeper hit in 2003. It is a book along the same vein as Memento, Me and Kev, The Prestige and others, where a dark tale is told in a puzzling manner, slowly releasing bits and pieces of information until the entire story is finally revealed by the end; and this is a type of book I love, to be honest, for the same reason I love hyperfiction and the like, although acknowledge as well that it's not everyone's cup of tea. And similarly, Clevenger wields a personal writing style here that is deliberately over-the-top self-conscious, deliberately showy and obtuse; and again, you're either going to like it like I did, or detest it and have it get in the way of you enjoying the novel whatsoever. That's the whole point of being wildly experimental, after all; to throw off the shackles of popularity, to know in advance that the project will appeal to only a slim amount of people, but that they'll be profoundly moved by it instead of a zillion people shrugging their shoulders and going, "Meh."

Much like Memento (and several other high-profile stories that have come out this year)......less

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