Keith Deininger's Blog, page 17

Things Happening When I was a 4th Grader Like Jake from The New Flesh...

Yup--that's me in the middle. So, this is kind of a weird thing to do, but I've been thinking recently about my 4th grade self, from whom I based Jake, the main protagonist in THE NEW FLESH, and looked up a few things that were going on when I was a kid at that time. I know, I know--look how full of himself this Keith guy is, but whatever. I find it interesting, so I thought I'd share. Here you go:

Bush senior is president.

Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer is arrested after the remains of 11 men and boys are found in his Milwaukee, Wisconsin, apartment. Police soon find out that he is involved in 6 more murders.

A Michigan court bars Dr. Jack Kevorkian from assisting in suicides.

An amateur video captures the beating of motorist Rodney King by Los Angeles, California police officers.

The body of publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell is found floating in the Atlantic Ocean near the Canary Islands.

Los Angeles Lakers point guard Magic Johnson announces he has HIV, effectively ending his NBA career.

Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury dies from pneumonia induced by AIDS.

KISS drummer Eric Carr dies from complications of heart cancer.

The Cold War ends after 44-46 years when the Supreme Soviet meets and formally dissolves the Soviet Union.

The Gulf War begins. Congress of the United States passes a resolution authorizing the use of military force to liberate Kuwait.

United Airlines Flight 585 crashes in Colorado Springs, Colorado, killing all 25 people on board, while a few miles down the road a young Keith Deininger is obsessed with Super Mario Brothers 3 on his Nintendo, exploring the drainage ditch behind the apartments across the street, and drawing and designing his own video games on paper. Also, he's written a couple of short stories, one about werewolf attacks and one about people disappearing for no reason.

And yes, that's a picture of me in 4th grade. That's my teacher, Mrs. Nance, behind me, and I can't remember anything about the other two kids. Friends? I doubt it. I didn't have many friends back then. Too much of a weirdo. ;)

From the Journals of Colin Thorne...

    What began as curiosity, and boredom (and lack of artistic inspiration), has now, somehow, become just as important as the work itself, as I begin to see patterns, to find things so unusual they are like pieces in a puzzle, evidence of transgressions hidden from human history. I’ve become absorbed, forgetting where I am and what I’m supposed to be doing, and time passes, forgotten, around me. I must look crazy, sitting there surrounded by my own little stacks and piles, breathing in shallow gasps, hair hanging in my face, licking my lips feverishly. I’ve found some odd things tucked in amongst the stacks of musty newspapers and sales receipts. Creepy things. A lock of blond hair taped to a plain cardboard sheet, “Daddy’s little girl,” scrawled shakily beneath the straggling strands. A wooden box carved with some sort of animal with a long body and tiny pointed teeth, a single yellowed molar rattling around inside. A balled up t-shirt stained with blood. A page ripped from a book with colored illustrations of insects. A small card with the words “Is This A Dream?” written on it with a calligraphy quill. A crumpled piece of stationary, still fragrant with perfume, a note begun but never finished: “Dear Mom, The doctors say I may be able to come home soon. They say the air here is doing me some good, but sometimes I wonder. At night I hear things, people talking about me, discussing whether I’m going to live or die. Isn’t that strange? The other day I thought I saw” That was all. The note was dated September 14th, 1944. I found a wooden, handmade advent calendar with little drawers to open for each day in December before Christmas. My grandmother used to get me the ones you can buy at the store made out of cardboard with the chocolates inside when I was a kid. Each compartment on the wooden one I found was stuffed with a different kind of animal hair, red like a fox’s, or brown and coarse like a bear’s. And I found some words scrawled on the back of a handwritten bill of sale for three dozen eggs and a bottle of bleach in thick pencil: “I’m here/Can you hear me?/Please don’t go/The gnomes on the wallpaper are jeering again/He moves under the floorboards.” The bill of sale was from “Joe’s Market,” undated and unsigned. It feels to me like all these things are somehow connected. It feels like if I look hard enough, I’ll discover their secret. I know it sounds crazy--it’s just a bunch of old junk in a basement. But there’s something here, something beneath the surface. And so I keep exploring the basement, looking through boxes, hoping to find inspiration, a clue to Klimt’s intentions, something about the past owner’s of this house, and where all this might have come from.
    Hang on. I have to go. Klimt is here to discuss my progress...

The New Flesh Book Release Party

In case you missed it, you can check out the live chat over on my publishers site.
DarkFuse Live Event:

From the Journals of Colin Thorne...

        I had the hardest time concentrating. Whenever I found a seemingly quiet place to brainstorm, there was always someone around to distract me, women with wrinkled dresses and hairstyles flattened from spending the night over, men with their ties loosened and thrown over their shoulders, always drunk, sometimes laughing. It was as if they followed me, found something to admire in each room I visited--mumbling in groups over a particular painting, then shuffling to the couches to lounge and smile. I had to keep moving. I found the library, where I’d been with Maddie at the party we’d crashed, and thought it was empty, closing the door behind me, sinking gratefully into one of the chairs. But before I could even get my notebook out, the middle-aged man with bottle-cap glasses appeared suddenly from behind a shelf of books and said: ‘The hum? Do you hear the hum?’ I asked him what he was doing there and he said he was hiding from his wife, trying to sober up before he saw her again. ‘Still?’ I asked him, since it had been several days since the party, but he only shook his head and told me he’d been all over the house. I stood, shrugged and left.
        Sometimes I’ll open a door and see something crazy. I saw a little girl stacking empty beer bottles all the way to the ceiling once and when she noticed me she put her finger to her mouth to signal I should be quiet and I closed the door. I saw a puddle of blood at the foot of a bed, but when I blinked it was gone. I saw a man wearing some sort of furry animal costume and one of those plain white-plastic masks having sex doggy style with a woman wearing fairy wings. It’s a strange house. I don’t know sometimes if I’m hallucinating or really seeing some of this stuff. It’s like I said: I haven’t been sleeping well. Okay, actually, I haven’t been sleeping at all really. Everything feels surreal when you’re tired enough.

From the Journals of Riley Thorne...

        I had the hardest time concentrating. Whenever I found a seemingly quiet place to brainstorm, there was always someone around to distract me, women with wrinkled dresses and hairstyles flattened from spending the night over, men with their ties loosened and thrown over their shoulders, always drunk, sometimes laughing. It was as if they followed me, found something to admire in each room I visited--mumbling in groups over a particular painting, then shuffling to the couches to lounge and smile. I had to keep moving. I found the library, where I’d been with Maddie at the party we’d crashed, and thought it was empty, closing the door behind me, sinking gratefully into one of the chairs. But before I could even get my notebook out, the middle-aged man with bottle-cap glasses appeared suddenly from behind a shelf of books and said: ‘The hum? Do you hear the hum?’ I asked him what he was doing there and he said he was hiding from his wife, trying to sober up before he saw her again. ‘Still?’ I asked him, since it had been several days since the party, but he only shook his head and told me he’d been all over the house. I stood, shrugged and left.
        Sometimes I’ll open a door and see something crazy. I saw a little girl stacking empty beer bottles all the way to the ceiling once and when she noticed me she put her finger to her mouth to signal I should be quiet and I closed the door. I saw a puddle of blood at the foot of a bed, but when I blinked it was gone. I saw a man wearing some sort of furry animal costume and one of those plain white masks having sex doggy style with a woman wearing fairy wings. It’s a strange house. I don’t know sometimes if I’m hallucinating or really seeing some of this stuff. It’s like I said: I haven’t been sleeping well. Okay, actually, I haven’t been sleeping at all really. Everything feels surreal when you’re tired enough.

Reading "The New Flesh"

So, yeah, this is me reading the first couple chapters of "The New Flesh." Check it out:

A Reading Group Guide to THE NEW FLESH

Because I'm one of those assholes who likes to think...

Take them for what they are: those annoying questions at the back of the book that teachers in school force you to answer in the form of an essay. But, you have to admit--begrudgingly perhaps--they do make you think. And thinking's good! Excellent for reading group discussions, that sort of thing.

Discussion Questions

Jake is clearly an imaginative protagonist. How much of his experience do you think is a product of his imagination and how much is really happening?

Who is the Melting Man? What does he want? Is his domain within the ancient tree real or a part of Jake's imagination?

What is the role of television in The New Flesh? What does the television set symbolize?

How is Jake's family's history important to the novel? How much to you think Jake's grandfather knows? Where do you think Jake is going at the conclusion of the novel?

Deininger Fiction: 'Have You Seen Our Son?'

They put up flyers all over town, several hundred full-color prints from the Kinko’s, and they returned soon after--unsure what else to do, needing something they could do--for another several hundred. The police would not consider their son missing until seventy-two hours had passed, and when it had there was little information for them to go on, knocking on neighbor’s doors, asking if anyone had seen him. Identical papers flickered from every light post and stop sign: 

Missing!
Rosebud “Bud” Thompson
Have you seen our son?!
Please call...

Bud looked happy, smiling, innocent, in his class picture from the year before, echoing every few feet down the streets. 

They returned home and immediately went in separate directions. Bud’s mother took the bedroom, closing the door and locking it so she would not be bothered as she lay on the bed and numbly rocked herself in and out of sleep. And Bud’s father sat on a grimy chair in the garage, dust spinning in the filtered sunlight about his face, unshaven, trying to breath and not think about what he really wanted to do. 

Meeting briefly in the kitchen several hours later, Bud’s mother said, “Hungry?”

“We’re going to find him,” Bud’s father said.

“Yes.”

“We can’t give up hope.”

“Yes.”

Bud’s father could tell his wife had numbed herself on Xanax from the bottle she kept pushed all the way to the back of the medicine cabinet. But he couldn’t do the same. Someone had to stay sharp. What if the police called?

When the police did call a couple of days later and told him over the phone they’d found his son’s body, that his son was dead, he couldn’t believe it--how could he believe something like that? He was asked to come down to the police station to identify the body and he went without a jacket and without a word to his wife, driving with his jaw clenched and his eyes fixed only on what was straight in front of him. 

When he got home several hours later, he went directly to his workshop in the garage, flicked the table saw to life, and dropped his wrists over the spinning blade. He couldn’t get the image of his son’s body out of his head, even as the world began to pulse away to the beat of the blood pumping from his mangled stumps. Bud had been covered with blood, globbed in his hair, caked on his face, filling his throat so he had choked to death. Bud’s father was thankful when the throbbing hot redness finally began to relax, and he could escape into darkness.

In the bedroom at the other side of the house, Bud’s mother smiled. She knew better. Sometimes Bud came to her, slipped into the bed next to her while she slept. She cradled his tiny boy’s body. She ran her hands down his cold back. She patted the back of his sticky head. She loved her son--she loved Bud so much! Stickiness filled her hands. Gradually, over the past couple of days, she’d realized she was not dreaming, that her son was actually here. Bud’s eyes began to open.

She had a choice, she knew. Her son was giving her a choice. She could join him if she wanted, and she wanted to join him more than anything ever in life.

Later, Bud’s father came with them as well, and their bodies’ were never found.

--From novel in progress, now called THE LAND BENEATH

"After a while, her head began to spin..."

After a while, her head began to spin and she found herself opening a door at the end of a hallway. Her heart stopped, her breath caught in her throat. For a moment, she thought she saw something, something bulging and bubbling beneath the sheets on the bed, staining it dark. Then she was hurrying down the hallway and was consumed once again by the crowd. She found herself going down the stairs, pushing through the laughing people, and thrust outside into the cool night. A tray of drinks floated toward her and she lifted another with her hand. A Wynton Marsalis track she recognized was blaring from the speakers. She made her way out to the dancing area on legs that no longer felt like her own. She downed her drink, stepped out onto the tarp, and could hear the gasps of recognition as she began to dance.

--From my novel in progress, currently titled UNDERWORLD DREAMS (but I think I'm going to change it again, have to get the title just right).

Google Searching Your Book Title: "The New Flesh"

An interesting and important exercise in these days of internet communication, to know what you're getting yourself into and to what you might be inadvertently connecting yourself, is to do a quick Google search of your book title. Although I'm pretty sure there has never been another book entitled "The New Flesh," there are some other things:

The band Nine Inch Nails has a song:
Then there is the band itself with the same title: And, of course, the famous line from the David Cronenberg film, Videodrome: Brilliant ending! And there are probably others, but these are the ones that get the biggest hits when you do a search. It's interesting. A very good thing to do before you commit to a title. ;)