Written in the form of an open letter
Justin,
Writers are the worst judges of their work. What they love, others might hate. What triggers indifference in them might incite fervent admiration from readers. Sometimes it’s easier to thrust a work into the wild and see what happens. And sometimes it’s devastating to put so much work into a novel to see few sales, reviews, and little hype.
Such is the publishing business, especially in the digital age. 
But here’s the thing: (more…)
The power of the human imagination lies not in its ability to represent events but in its ability to exaggerate them. Such exaggerations give birth to absurdity, which, when properly executed, reflects culture and the human condition more honestly than mimesis.
In The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Saying Goodbye, Ben Arzate serves us a melange or absurd people and scenarios in fragmented, or cartoonish, plates. When taken together, the sum of absurd representations exceeds the parts. (more…)
by
Nicholas Day
[Here’s a short story from Nicholas Day’s collection, Now That We’re Alone. Out now.]
Nobody can deny the existence of ghosts if they possess that thing called a memory, wherein the mind recalls voice, appearance, and even action. Everything that has come before has a potential to haunt… as long as one remembers. And if one is moved emotionally, or their actions easily swayed by memory, by history – because everything that has come before is history, or memory, thus ghosts – then the dead are busy at work in our living world. Many people are haunted for their entire lives, and remain so until they die. Then they have no more room for secrets and become – themselves – a memory. A ghost. (more…)
by
Ben Arzate.
“Language is a trap. To deny the existence of whatever. A melancholy enticement. Like balloons. Language is a fucking disaster. I’m unsure of how to birth the participle. Underneath. No reason to ever go outside any more. The days choke in the darkness & supplicate to endless rest. There’s no question of what will happen in the future because there is no future. Life is a fatal attraction.”
M Kitchell’s In the Desert of Mute Squares is difficult to classify. Its publisher, Inside the Castle, describes it as a “text object,” which seems the most appropriate name for it. The form of the book, from its text placement, to its spacing, to its images, to the reader’s interactions with the book itself are just as essential as the text. As the excerpt above implies, this seems to be an attempt to transcend the frustrating limitations of language.
Even the title seems to be a self-deprecating acknowledgment of literature’s limitations, referring to itself as a wasteland of pages that can’t truly communicate. Slaughtered trees which can never truly convey the impossible. It includes the equally self-deprecating subtitle of or Errors; or, Dreams I Never Had; or, Late Capitalism. (more…)
Legendary in the underground for more than a decade, the controversial novel is now in print.
Sentient meat covers the world. Veins fill the bloodred sky. People transform into monsters called the Slime. Mind Quakes alter people’s consciousnesses. For That What, your typical gumshoe, the world provides more than enough work—until he’s infected with the slime.
While he struggles to come to terms with his inevitable transformation, he takes on one last job: a murder mystery with ties to the mythical King of the Slime. Finding an unlikely ally in Tonakga, a human-reptile hybrid, That races to solve the case—and to uncover the truth about the King of the Slime, who might hold the cure to his disease.
Blending pulp detective novels, surrealism, and experimental fiction, “Dig the Meat Music” is equal parts burlesque, noir thriller, experimental novel, and social commentary. 
“Daulton Dickey’s ‘Flesh Made World’ is a glorious mindfuck. The eloquence of Dickey’s writing style consumed me like a drug, whisking me through time and space until I didn’t know whether to go mad or fall in love. I did both and more, thanks to his evocative voice and characterization. Entertainment aside, this book has also been a huge inspiration to me as an artist.” —Jessica McHugh
About the book:
Death surrounds Sarah and Daulton. While grieving for their loved ones, they each
must navigate a universe where time isn’t linear, where memories and fantasies collide, merging with reality. The dead haunt them, the world shifts and changes, and time disintegrates. Slipping in and out of the present, they relive moments from their past—and they never know when they’re in the present. As the shifts increasingly dominate their lives, as their grips on reality loosen, Sarah and Daulton struggle to find a way to orient themselves in the present, to escape the infinite loop of pain, suffering, and confusion. If they can’t find a way out, then will they be trapped in a kaleidoscope of torment and grief? An experimental novel about death, the nature of memories, and reality, Flesh Made World thrusts readers into a hallucinogenic universe where space and time constantly unravel.
A self-professed surrealist, Daulton Dickey is a novelist, poet, and content creator currently living in Indiana with his wife and kids. He’s the author of A Peculiar Arrangement of Atoms: Stories, Still Life with Chattering Teeth and People-Shaped Things, and other stories, Elegiac Machinations: an experimental novella, and Bastard Virtues, a novel. Rooster Republic Press will publish his latest novel, Flesh Made World, later this year. Contact him at lostitfunhouse [at] gmail [dot] com
by
Daulton Dickey.
Encountering lobster- or lizard-human hybrids occurs frequently when you’re an imagination masquerading as meat. I bumped into one or the other at least once a day; and whenever I do, they say, “Daulton, why do you insist on writing easy-to-read bestsellers?” To which I reply, “I am a professional. I go where the people lead me. If they want action, I give them action. If they want spiders hatching in their ears, I cultivate brown recluses on their behalf. If they want corpses to replace rain and blanket the city in a violent storm, then so be it.”
I wrote my latest soon-to-be blockbuster, Flesh Made World, in the midst of a psychic and nervous breakdown. I admitted myself into the psych ward on suicide watch the day after I completed the novel. While I was writing it—experiencing suicidal depression, coming to terms with the sudden death of my father, and in the grip of a months’ long anxiety attack—people and creatures kept saying, “Yo, D, why don’t you write a non-linear, hard-to-read novel crammed with surreal and disturbing imagery, and ambiguous as hell?” I said, “All right, all right. If that’s what you want. I’m already on it.” (more…)
by
Daulton Dickey.
Empty and broken
It all falls down
Empty and broken, the city streets evacuated with a sense of calm. Everything shattered. Glass lay like snowflakes, in piles tall as people. The sky cracked. A bubble, dark as night, bloomed in the center of the crack. No good fucking reptiles swallowed everything. Traces blasted through the sky: clouds, maybe. Or veins. Blood spurted from them, rained down, and covered the city. Definitely veins. Where was the man who played the violin? He stood in the street in a minute earlier. Then he vanished. Did he vanish? Where had everyone gone? (more…)
by
Jessica McHugh.
“Janie, will you please eat something? Please? Maybe later, okay? Are you comfortable? Would you like a blanket? You look cold, Janie. Are you cold? Do you need a blanket?”
“No, thank you,” she replied softly, wrapping her arms around her legs.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, Adam, I’m sure.”
He kissed the top of her head, and although she smiled, she didn’t look up. She simply smoothed her hair and squeezed her legs tighter.
“I’m going to the store for some cigarettes. Need anything?”
“No, thank you.”
“Okay. I shouldn’t be gone long.”
Adam bent down to kiss her again, but when she preemptively started to fix her hair, he backed off with a sigh. He headed out the door without another word, and as he drove to the store, his thoughts throttled the backs of his eyes. There was so much pain in thinking about his dear, fragile wife. She was so distant, so tortured, and he felt absolutely powerless to help her. It wrenched his heart to pieces to watch her shrink away from his touch. He wanted so badly to hold her, to console her, to make her understand that these things just happen.
Children die all the time. (more…)
by
Daulton Dickey.
Let’s get the point out of the way first, then expand on it: memoirs are works of fiction. Specifically, memoirs as artifacts of “truth” or “reality” are neither true nor real. They are constructions founded in subjectivity and the malleability of human memories; and as products of the written word, they are constructed using techniques similar, if not identical, to works of fiction.
At first glance, memoirs seem to hold a place separate from fiction and non-fiction. Memoirs appear to some as the vehicles through which truth, in some sense objective, travels.
Memoirs are strictly subjective, incapable of anything approaching objectivity. (more…)
Lost in the Funhouse 