Jack worked at the surfboard shop, Karen was a lifeguard, and every night was perfect. And since teenage love destroyed by suicide is hard to get over, Jack simply holds on to his dead girlfriend. At first it is the long phone calls deep into the night, reliving the memories of drinking, black metal bands, the “medicine”and the parties an old man named Manson would throw for teenagers at his creepy house on the hill. Then came the regular sightings of her corpse at the beach, and in his bed. Now in his mid-twenties, Jack experiences his best nightmare everthe chance for revenge on Old Man Manson for murdering Karen! He reunites with Karen for a long journey through night, confronted by her parents, General Hook, the Ghost Witch, a woman in a gummy dress, an old man from a pricker bush, and a furry monster. Finally, with a list of 66 ways to punish and kill Old Man Manson, Jack confronts him in the dining room of a haunted hotel.”
Editorial Reviews
Review
“A singular vision of surreal violence and grotesque beauty, sung into story by a voice unlike any I ve ever heard before, innocent and wise and comic and heart-breaking beyond belief. Patnaude has woven this hallucinatory, multimedia score from the imagery of B horror films, the language of poetry, and the experience of America s abandoned youth. In words the narrator uses to describe the music of his favorite metal band, “First Aide Medicine” ‘is terrifying to the extreme, yet beneath the singer s garbled, gravelly voice there lie beautiful, primitive, racketyat times accidentalmelodies buried in the stacks and waves of distortion for those, that is, willing to risk their lives to enter the labyrinth.’ Be warned: I didn t realize what I was risking by reading this book, and now I am hopelessly lost within it, haunting it as much as it haunts me.” Jayson Iwen, 2010 judge of the Emergency Press International Book Contest, and author of “Six Trips in Two Directions” and “The Momentary Jokebook” “
A singular vision of surreal violence and grotesque beauty, sung into story by a voice unlike any I’ve ever heard before, innocent and wise and comic and heart-breaking beyond belief. Patnaude has woven this hallucinatory, multimedia score from the imagery of B horror films, the language of poetry, and the experience of America’s abandoned youth. In words the narrator uses to describe the music of his favorite metal band, “First Aide Medicine” “is terrifying to the extreme, yet beneath the singer’s garbled, gravelly voice there lie beautiful, primitive, rackety–at times accidental–melodies buried in the stacks and waves of distortion… for those, that is, willing to risk their lives to enter the labyrinth.” Be warned: I didn’t realize what I was risking by reading this book, and now I am hopelessly lost within it, haunting it as much as it haunts me.
Jayson Iwen, 2010 judge of the Emergency Press International Book Contest, and author of “Six Trips in Two Directions” and “The Momentary Jokebook”.
About the Author
Nicholaus Patnaude grew up in haunted, rural Connecticut. After completing his degree at Bard College, he worked in a variety of mental institutions and halfway houses. Currently, he is a teacher working in Istanbul.
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