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Popping Cherries
Ted Rasmussen is one pervy teenager. At fourteen, he has many things: a bowl cut, braces, acne, and every Spice Girls music video on one VHS tape. What he doesn't have is Laila: angel of the flesh, nymph of the high school halls, the all-consuming core of his pubescent lust. At first his life is simple enough. He plays Super Nintendo, smokes pot, masturbates into his couch, and tries to be good to his kid sister. When his parents put him on a mysterious medication to help him focus in school, Ted's brain flirts with hallucination. In the storm of his delusion, he finds comfort in watching Laila from his hiding spot outside her bedroom window. It's not until his troubles manifest as small mutative creatures that his grasp on reality is truly challenged. A farcical tale of adolescent fantasy, hallucinatory horror, and tongue-in-cheek satire, POPPING CHERRIES is an eye-opening doctrine for any teen who feels its them against the world, and a gateway back into the juvenile mind for those who have forgotten the struggle. Blending kitschy Solondzian humor with claustrophobic Cronenbergian dread, POPPING CHERRIES reminds us of the mistakes we've made and why we made them as our childhood was yanked from under our feet.
244 pages, Paperback
First published August 26, 2013
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November 13, 2024
Blurb: “Ted Rasmussen is one pervy teenager. At fourteen, he has many a bowl cut, braces, acne, and every Spice Girls music video on one VHS tape. What he doesn't have is angel of the flesh, nymph of the high school halls, the all-consuming core of his pubescent lust. At first his life is simple enough. He plays Super Nintendo, smokes pot, masturbates into his couch, and tries to be good to his kid sister.”
Cetus Revok, taking the surname of the antagonist of ‘Scanners’ that the Ephemerol Night Terrors (aka Chad and his briefcase) imprint takes its name from.
The central thrust (hah!) is Ted’s fantastication of Laila Skirvin, which grows increasingly lurid and desperate through the piece, leading to “a lust apex” which is utterly shameful for not just the protagonist, but for the reader.
An INHUMAN LEAGUE of Ted’s sad circumstances (parents both out to lunch) and forced drug dependency (an unknown metamphetamine, surely), heading to a car crash…okay, that’s more Cronenberg’s territory…perhaps it doesn’t quite come off in a satisfying-to-the-reader way as the protagonist seems endlessly trapped in a nightmare of his own making? Or was it the fault of his too-cheap father…or horrid mother, if that’s not too much of a spoiler?
Has the “my teenage crush” trope been done to death in popular fiction? Perhaps, but what if such crushes extends far into adulthood? My decade of growing up was the late 70s / 80s, but the 90s nostalgia in here is eminently relatable…and to some degree the references were merely an extension of previous decades. That is all gone now, the death of the monoculture and all that, but that we have works like “Popping Cherries” to help us remember is definitely a net benefit. Only wish (not spoiling this too much I hope?) that Ted could have broken away from his circumstances and found freedom to develop and grow into adulthood.
I *just* noticed the title is a double entendre…boy, am I a daft bugger.
The first chapter “Girl In Salmon” sets the stage luridly for what follows, it seems like when your happiest adolescent moments are in your own fantasies, life is suitably unbearable to cause you to question continuing. But you still do.
And I just had this thought, what if it never ends? At least, while perhaps the author was also indulging in some of the “cherries” on offer, at least it gave me (and perhaps him) a chance to put down their shoe phones…they’re not really phones, we really need to identify these devices with a different label, like TRICORDERS, perhaps? Anyway, Ted would have and could have been a friend I had growing up and hanging out…people actually used to just hang out, perhaps at a park playing some version of ball, perhaps at our own houses…all that is dead now as we now ferret our young ones from one structured activity to another, sitting on the sidelines or in the lobby while they are guided along one thing or another, from tae kwon do to soccer to ‘accelerated learning’. Maybe his TRICORDER (as if his dad wouldn’t have bought him a cheap half-broken Android phone) would have saved him from such a dull, turgid fate.
This is a fun ride of a book which perhaps ends in a bit of a lock groove and numbness but this is a recapitulation of the start so that’s more than fair from what’s a first work from Revok and hopefully the lad keeps writing in whatever way suits him even if long fiction has been set aside for MORE EPHEMEROL’s more vignette-style pieces, such as the B-side HYPERNUMB:
In the age of hyper-numb
We tell ourselves that love still stands a chance
Computer programs running fine
Eating life from deep within our minds
Replicas produced, formulas mirrored
Bled of all purpose, way too many times (designs)
When diversion wins, humans lose
We’re left with nothing but a grim commercial bruise
With the heart of all the art absent from the start
We’re doomed
We’ve got a little time left to spend saving lovers
As the shift grows near and it becomes clear
We must secure what we hold most dear
Our drives are full
Our doors are closed off to fools
The program loads
The data cannot be removed
Cetus Revok, taking the surname of the antagonist of ‘Scanners’ that the Ephemerol Night Terrors (aka Chad and his briefcase) imprint takes its name from.
The central thrust (hah!) is Ted’s fantastication of Laila Skirvin, which grows increasingly lurid and desperate through the piece, leading to “a lust apex” which is utterly shameful for not just the protagonist, but for the reader.
An INHUMAN LEAGUE of Ted’s sad circumstances (parents both out to lunch) and forced drug dependency (an unknown metamphetamine, surely), heading to a car crash…okay, that’s more Cronenberg’s territory…perhaps it doesn’t quite come off in a satisfying-to-the-reader way as the protagonist seems endlessly trapped in a nightmare of his own making? Or was it the fault of his too-cheap father…or horrid mother, if that’s not too much of a spoiler?
Has the “my teenage crush” trope been done to death in popular fiction? Perhaps, but what if such crushes extends far into adulthood? My decade of growing up was the late 70s / 80s, but the 90s nostalgia in here is eminently relatable…and to some degree the references were merely an extension of previous decades. That is all gone now, the death of the monoculture and all that, but that we have works like “Popping Cherries” to help us remember is definitely a net benefit. Only wish (not spoiling this too much I hope?) that Ted could have broken away from his circumstances and found freedom to develop and grow into adulthood.
I *just* noticed the title is a double entendre…boy, am I a daft bugger.
The first chapter “Girl In Salmon” sets the stage luridly for what follows, it seems like when your happiest adolescent moments are in your own fantasies, life is suitably unbearable to cause you to question continuing. But you still do.
And I just had this thought, what if it never ends? At least, while perhaps the author was also indulging in some of the “cherries” on offer, at least it gave me (and perhaps him) a chance to put down their shoe phones…they’re not really phones, we really need to identify these devices with a different label, like TRICORDERS, perhaps? Anyway, Ted would have and could have been a friend I had growing up and hanging out…people actually used to just hang out, perhaps at a park playing some version of ball, perhaps at our own houses…all that is dead now as we now ferret our young ones from one structured activity to another, sitting on the sidelines or in the lobby while they are guided along one thing or another, from tae kwon do to soccer to ‘accelerated learning’. Maybe his TRICORDER (as if his dad wouldn’t have bought him a cheap half-broken Android phone) would have saved him from such a dull, turgid fate.
This is a fun ride of a book which perhaps ends in a bit of a lock groove and numbness but this is a recapitulation of the start so that’s more than fair from what’s a first work from Revok and hopefully the lad keeps writing in whatever way suits him even if long fiction has been set aside for MORE EPHEMEROL’s more vignette-style pieces, such as the B-side HYPERNUMB:
In the age of hyper-numb
We tell ourselves that love still stands a chance
Computer programs running fine
Eating life from deep within our minds
Replicas produced, formulas mirrored
Bled of all purpose, way too many times (designs)
When diversion wins, humans lose
We’re left with nothing but a grim commercial bruise
With the heart of all the art absent from the start
We’re doomed
We’ve got a little time left to spend saving lovers
As the shift grows near and it becomes clear
We must secure what we hold most dear
Our drives are full
Our doors are closed off to fools
The program loads
The data cannot be removed
March 3, 2015
At times an unnervingly raw look into the mind of a teenage boy, Popping Cherries finds you chuckling at its moments of brutal honesty that thrust through the thin film of morality and social mores.
With a familiar pang of self-consciousness summoned from the far away high school of your past, Cetus Revok pries at every weak seam of your comfort zone. Running just beneath the surface, however, our narrator is deeply sensitive, loyal, regretful, and well meaning even when impulsiveness digs him yet another foot deeper into trouble. He is deeply relatable in a blushingly naked way.
Then the whole thing spirals into the kind of insanity that makes you question where reality stopped or if it was ever really there to begin with.
Popping Cherries is a unique story told in an effortlessly unabashed voice without hesitation or censorship that leaves you reeling, a little more disturbed, and totally entertained. Cetus Revok is onto something here.
With a familiar pang of self-consciousness summoned from the far away high school of your past, Cetus Revok pries at every weak seam of your comfort zone. Running just beneath the surface, however, our narrator is deeply sensitive, loyal, regretful, and well meaning even when impulsiveness digs him yet another foot deeper into trouble. He is deeply relatable in a blushingly naked way.
Then the whole thing spirals into the kind of insanity that makes you question where reality stopped or if it was ever really there to begin with.
Popping Cherries is a unique story told in an effortlessly unabashed voice without hesitation or censorship that leaves you reeling, a little more disturbed, and totally entertained. Cetus Revok is onto something here.
December 22, 2014
It starts off as your typical rebel boy in high school with all his awkwardness, and then it slowly descends into madness. It was a real treat for a book to be so unpredictable.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews