Crash Clown: A Novel or Eighteen Tragedies

by Frank Mullen

In this, his long-awaited first novel, Frank Mullen holds up a mirror to American personal injury law, addictions to booze and information, the failure of relationships between men and women, and standard Dachshunds. Pete Consin works as a forensic investigator of everyday catastrophes that are as absurd as they are heartbreaking.  When Pete loses his ability to separate the sorrow in his work from the sorrow in his personal life, both worlds crash spectacularly, in tandem, chapter by chapter. In these eighteen beautifully written tragedies, Mullen weaves a story, with sarcasm and poignancy, about unforgettable people as they churn through their private American disasters.  He takes you on a captivating drive across a landscape of legal apologues, quiet betrayals, and suicidal preoccupation. His writing is skeptical and comic, reassuring throughout, and pointed toward unexpected hope and redemption.

282 pages, Paperback

Published March 2, 2016

Reviews

[John McCreery · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like Vonnegut? You'll like Crash Clown! Mullen has patiently descended into the forces that so many face: the ever present ambience of blitzing bad news, relationship ideals to dysfunction, and addiction. This is a personal fiction written in a series of vignettes, gradually revealing the quiet interior of the soul we the people keep at bay in our clandestine public lives but perpetually and desperately seek. Poignant, heart wrenching, funny. It will leave you aching for Mullen's next book.

[Sonya · Rating 5 out of 5]

A story of a mans decent and rise to a satisfactory place, maybe not for us but an improvement for him. It was sad and hopeful but not amazing. It was enough and sometimes that can be good enough. I really enjoyed his writing and I was deep inside Pete’s life.