The House of Trouts

Kilgore Trout’s latest book, World’s Funniest Thermonuclear Accidents, was forthcoming from Michael O’Mara. He shared a bathroom with Kilgore Trout, whose latest book, Complications in the Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum, had forthcome from Yale Press. The two Trouts co-rented a kitchen with Kilgore Trout, whose book I Was a Teenage Obergruppenführer, had not found a publisher. All three Trouts did not read each other’s books and did not discuss literary matters at all. When one Trout saw another, he said: “Nice day, Mr. Trout.” If one Trout was working on his book and the other Trout spotted this, he said: “Hard at work, Mr. Trout?” One time, Kilgore Trout broke Kilgore Trout’s prize antique cup, handed down nine generations of the Trout family. Kilgore Trout looked at his shattered heritage and said: “Accidents happen, Mr. Trout.”

Attention Novelists!

Test 1

Have you written a dreary middlebrow novel set in a part of India, the Orient, or a sundrenched third-world nation? Is your novel about postcolonial struggles and skirmishes faced by impoverished nations during a specific period in history? Does your novel dwell upon the emotional turmoil at the root of a persecuted community, and does it focus on a stoic native whose trials are shown at their most heartbreaking and humourless? Well done! Your novel will be popular with middle-aged divorcées and airheaded beach readers who want the covers of their novels to reflect the places in which they skim them. Your novel probably looks like this:

Test 2

Have you written a shameless, tearjerking piece of third-world issuetainment after a moving trip to Nigeria in an attempt to “spread the message” to readers around the world about suffering, poverty, and the first-world’s indifference to famine, drought and oppression? Was your intention originally to donate all profits to charities, but now that you’ve written the novel, you need the money to pay for your mortgage and car insurance? Is your book told from a child’s point of view in insultingly simple prose that approximates how a Nigerian would speak, since you didn’t attempt to transcribe dialect during your trip, you simply made concerned faces and wept in your hotel room? Well done! Your novel will be bought at airports and remain unread for months until the reader has the guts to skim a few pages before he puts it down for being too depressing. Your novel probably looks like this:

Test 3

Have you written a sentimental, nostalgic novel romanticising the past in a dreary Irish, Scottish or Northern English ex-mining town? Is your novel stuffed with lazily specific references to things that happened in the past so people think you are “evoking” a certain place in time wonderfully, rather than simply ransacking your own bland childhood cynically for profit? Does your novel have extremely tame romantic scenes and po-faced attempts to depict the bigotry and racism at the heart of these backward communities in the form of hokey “literary” metaphors and stand-alone paragraph-sentences? Well done! Your novel will sell like spangles to the over-sixties market, desperate to redeem their miserable childhoods by misremembering every bad thing that happened to them as a good thing that didn’t happen to them. Your novel looks like:

Reply From Nicola Barker

Look MJ

Do I really want to read about a writer (WHO IS ALWAYS THE FUCKING AUTHOR) struggling to write a novel (WHICH IS ALWAYS THE FUCKING BOOK THE AUTHOR IS WRITING) then overcoming his block through some tedious personal contrivance (ALWAYS BASED ON THE AUTHOR’S BORING LIFE) and publishing the book to nationwide acclaim (EMBARRASSING WISHFUL THINKING)? The problem with a hall of mirrors is the reflection being infinitised has to be something beautiful. The infinite recursion of a man tugging his Thomas does not good literature make. So please. I am telling you this for you own wellbeing. DO NOT WRITE ABOUT A WRITER WRITING ABOUT A WRITER WRITING ABOUT A WRITER, AD INFINITUM. No one will want to read the sluice of spunk splattered on your feeble mirrors. Do what I do. Write whimsical and emotional narratives about whimsical Londoners. Better than tugging your tugboat forevermore. I say this wishing you love and prosperity,

Nicola

Letter to Lydia Millet

Hey Lydia!

Come on, what do you say to a bit of modern-day metafiction? Do you really believe it breathed its last breath thirty years ago? Or can metafictive novels set in Scotland really find readers in an indifferent marketplace? All right, I know you’re rolling your eyes! But let me pitch some ideas to you. Check out these pearls of originality:

1) A writer struggling to write his novel falls in love then writes his novel
2) A writer struggling to write his novel has an affair with a teenage girl then writes his novel
3) A writer struggling to write his novel visits a foreign country, sleeps with a prostitute, takes LSD and writes his novel
4) A writer struggling to write his novel writes his novel after four years of torturous re-writing
5) A writer struggling to write his novel abandons writing his novel and takes a job in a call centre and spends his life forever fielding questions about the novel he one day planned to write
6) A writer struggling to write his novel writes a haiku instead
7) A writer struggling to write his novel escapes the novel and writes the novel the author-scriptor is writing
8) A writer struggling to write his novel eats his own his head then publishes the resultant turds
9) A writer struggling to write his novel moves into Mulligan Stew, steals Antony Lamont’s Sur-fictional opus, moves back into the original novel and publishes Lamont’s novel to complete critical ignorance

Let’s team up. Light some firecrackers of invention.

MJ

Reply From Chuck Palahniuk

Dear MJ,

Received your letter via Patrick. There are several things a man can do to attract a woman. I present a series of options for perusal in the following numerically partitioned sentences. 1) Kidnap. All you need for this is a car and a popular secluded late-night environs. Prowl lanes and nooks for bait. Once you have kidnapped your selected woman she will hate and fear you: the best qualities for a woman to have in any relationship. 2) Wear Down. Works best with friends. Wear a female friend down over a series of years by constantly telling them you like them and they won’t find anyone as devoted to them as you, and eventually they will ditch the dream of a proper man and take up with you out of desperation. 3) Subliminal Self-Advertising. Stalk your prey, and on their daily route, flash brief adverts of your brilliance at opportune moments. Signs saying MJ IS GREAT! YOU SHOULD MARRY MJ! every few yards. After a month or so she will fall into your arms. You can resuscitate her herbally. I hope these tips have been helpful. Good luck with the being you thing.

Chuckily,

Chuck

Letter to Bret Easton Ellis

Dear Patrick,

I read your novel American Psycho the other week and I must protest. Firstly, Genesis’s shining moment is the single ‘I Can’t Dance’—a beautiful admission of terpsichorean ineptitude that most unpopular white males can sympathise with—not the early prog LPs like Foxtrot et al. But I write today with a more practical request in mind. I cannot pick up chicks, Patrick! I think the problem lies in my appearance. I am a wearer of spectacles and as we know, ladies dislike eyewear on a male because she sees a self-loathing nerd and not a fertile future husband. What they like are muscular jowls and handsome cheekbones! So what I have done, Patrick, is I have injected my cheeks with botox and padded the resulting balloon-like bloats with polystyrene. My complexion resembles the actor and human man Mickey Rourke, whose physique was once described as a condom filled with macadamia nuts, and sculpted my cheekbones to resemble ski slopes. Currently, in my encephalitic state, I am finding it difficult moving in and out of rooms, my head now resembling the posterior of a rhino in terms of girth and heft. Since ladies are so obliging to you when you pick them up on the street and pay them (they even let you eviscerate them with coat hangers!), I was hoping for some tips, my good friend?

Hopefully,

MJ

Reply From JT Leroy

Dear MJ/Paul,

Hey man, thanks for writing to me. (You can tell I’m an American since I start my letters with hey man which all Americans use in their formal correspondence to denote their Yankeeism ha ha ha pulling yer leg man). I love that you love me! Thank you for reading my little bookies! I wrote them on napkins and on the floor. But look, Paul. I think you’re a mixed-up kid. I think you need guidance. Don’t be writing that metafiction shit man. That stuff was old hat in the eighties. Imagine what it is now! It’s a decaying chapeau. It’s a mouldy bowler, man. Stop it. I don’t read modern stuff since I once read a Paul Auster novel and thought what the hell is this man, is the dude on artichokes and cough syrup or something what the fiddle? If you were here, I’d teach you all the things you need to know about the piddle-widdle and the prostate. So get on a plane! I live in Brooklyn, which being a Scot you will know is one street somewhere at the bottom of New York, near the scuzzy bit where the blacks live but sort of near the posh bit where the yuppie hipsters live. We all consume Ritz crackers and Chablis. In the meantime, I have attached a scan of my left nipple to amuse your cousins. My latest book—This Squeezy Bottle Looks Somewhat Phallic—is coming out next March, be sure to buy four copies.

Til then,

J T Leroy

Letter to JT Leroy

Dear J T Leroy,

I am your biggest fandangle. I love how you wrote those two books about child abuse under a fake name. I love how you paid a boring Brooklyn writer to pretend to be you to make the shitty shit more real. When I was a child I too hung around trailer park hookers and helped perform fellatio on beer-sodden belliferous brutes. (I didn’t really, but hey!) I like how your books are written at a level children can understand and from the POV of kids, because if there’s one thing we need more of as readers it’s whimsical child-abuse novels written for children but read by adults and written under fake names. I love you! MJ is not my real name, my real one is Paul Robertson. I come from the small Highland town of Nairn where porridge powers pylons and our only entertainment is the Village Yoyo, which gets passed sequentially among all the residents. It isn’t my shot until next March! I am so bored I could cut myself! I write what the kids call metafiction but no one wants to read me. Do you think I should start blowing truckers on the side? I know my way around a ladycave but I have never patted a pal’s protuberance before, sober or otherwise. Perhaps you can show me with diagrams what to do in that area? I would probably die for you, but I’m not 100% on that.

Lovingly,

MJ/Paul

Letter to the Agent

Dear _____

I sent you my novel Sally’s Testament last month and received a complaint about the opening sentence: “Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing.” Your complaint was that this sentence is the opening of Martin Amis’s 1995 novel, The Information. I would like to explain. My use of this sentence dates back to 1994 when my novel was originally a short story, ‘Cherries in Bloom.’ It appeared in New Fiction 8 in modified form: “Cherries at night, I believe, contain pips who cry in their sleep and then say Eat me!” When it came to composing my novel in 2010 I adapted portions of the above sentence for my own use, oblivious to this chance occurrence of the same line in Amis’s novel. I hope this clears up any error and you will reconsider my MS.

Yours obligingly,

Alice McCulloch

The Legend of Joan Henry’s Hamster

For Willow

Joan Henry’s father woke her up one midnight and said: “They’re making F-level workers obsolete.” She picked the sleep from her eyes. “What?” He sighed. “Do I have to repeat myself, dammit?” Joan blinked and said nothing. “Report came in today. Budget cuts. Can’t afford electricity in the F-quarter anymore, we’re being squeezed so tight our eyeballs are popping out their sockets.” Joan yawned and lay back down.

She wouldn’t get a rational account from her father—he carped at the company in times of boom or bust. Every little hiccup was lazy managers screwing workers out their rights, and so on. “All right, father. Let me get dressed.” The report was clear: F-level redundancies in effect in two weeks dependent on massive turnarounds in departmental expenditure. This meant there was a chance for each department to make internal cuts and appeal to the company board. Joan downed her OJ.

“Suppose I’ll have to sort it out, as usual.” She grabbed her keys, reassured her father, and sped to work. She was the only person in her department who wasn’t wracked with anxiety, hatred or fear. In the day she worked on reception in the marketing offices and at night she helped her father in the processing plant when his arthritis got too painful. If the managers discovered a lapse in his production output, he’d be obsolete. So they managed—got their two paychecks every week—and kept alive.

But these moaners, carpers and haters. They didn’t understand the basic tenet of ‘cutthroat’ capitalism—serve stakeholders, dispense with the rest. To keep their lives, all they had to do was reach their monthly targets and stay within the permitted departmental expenses. First problem: the electric bill in the office was too high. Joan’s solution? To reduce the number of computers being used, have secretaries share two machines on rotation and managers revert to pen or pencil. Use handcrank torches, not overhead lights. More importantly: convert electric power into hamster power.

For two months, Joan had been training her hamster Fidel to run at speeds of two hundred kilometres per hour in his wheel. Using her hamster as an exemplar, the temps, secretaries and managers could train their own hamsters to power computers, desk lights or photocopiers, without recourse to the main grid. This would make the office a self-sustaining department with no encroachment on company power sources, keeping them on the payroll database. It was a way of manipulating the company spreadsheet, known as the Death Grid or the Slaughterbox. Joan laughed off these terms.

Manual workers had a longer grace period to cut their expenses before obsolescence. So Joan expanded her animal retinue to include guinea pigs or cats—pets with more stamina who could fuel large industrial machines through paw power alone. Her office had succeeded in cutting its costs, and the management was impressed by Joan’s enterprising attitude. The exploitation of animals was something they could use to their advantage—humans had been a fungible resource for centuries, but their reluctance to be enslaved had caused so many net losses and growth irregularities over the years.

Joan was called into the office of a company director. Now she was nervous. He was a short man.

“Joan—we’ve been analysing the efficaciousness of your hamster-centred capital abridgement scenario. We find this an exciting new enterprise. Is there any way we could build towards, say, a complete animal-based production situation and a permanent human obsolescence occurrence, say, within forty-eight days?” he asked in one breath.

“You want to replace human workers with animal workers?”

“Yes.”

“If I can’t—”

“Obsolescence.”

“It will be done.”

“Leave now.”

When Joan got home she bit her knuckles so tight the bite marks bloomed blood. Her casual problem-solving approach had pit her against the very people she was supposed to be helping. She had to decide whether she wanted to be made obsolete along with her F-level co-workers as a useless martyr, or keep her father and herself alive. The latter. She rounded up some tigers from the zoo and trained them in stenography. Macaques made good cleaners and coffee boys. Baboons could sit in for managers. As for temps, a series of rattlesnakes sharing the role would do nicely. She got to work.

In the factories, giraffes were the most effective replacement. They could transfer produce from conveyor belts up to the second floor, where polar bears stored them in the freezers, ready for distribution. Joan tried to solicit help from her co-workers but the truth was difficult to conceal—training a baboon to use Microsoft Excel while managers stood scowling in the corner was hardly a good omen. The time soon came for the workers’ obsolescence. It happened on a Friday, end of the working week. 

 Four brawny guards arrived at the F-level offices to frogmarch obsolescents to the ovens for quick removal. All was going well until Joan was grabbed by the guards and thrown among her colleagues. “I’m not supposed to go. I trained the animals,” she said. “You’re on the list,” the guard said. And there she was—JOAN HENRY, OBSOLESCENT. The company director had tricked her. When the animals saw their master being lead away, they revolted. The baboons clobbered the guards, the lions went straight for their throats. Guts and hair everywhere, blood on the photocopiers. Joan laughed.

“Brilliant!” she said. “Now we can manipulate the forms. You’re all free!” Her co-workers were relieved and conflicted. Did she do that on purpose? Was that her plan all along? Joan saw the advantage of telling a lie at this point and decided to tell the lie. “Of course. You didn’t think I’d let them take you, did I? Come on, you know me better than that!” And she was a heroine to the whole of Level-F, the slipperiest heroine ever. She ticked off all the workers as being ‘obsolete’ and sent them home through the fire exits. She would contact them with further instructions, whatever they were.

*

It wasn’t easy to devise instructions with her father constantly interrupting her thoughts. “Got the instructions yet?” he’d ask two times an hour. “No father, please give me more time.” Then he’d skulk off, muttering: “We don’t have time.” That really irked her.

She knew that the animals would respond to her commands. She had them at her disposal. Only she needed more to stage a revolt. She needed six or seven departments of trained office animals to take on the company’s security forces and topple the management. So there was only one thing to do: infiltrate the E-level as a panda. 

Plans had already been made to introduce animals into offices and factories, but the department managers were useless at earning the respect of their animal workers, knowing only brutality. Whipping a baboon seven times would not make him turn out a first-rate Sector Q report on Opportunities for Diversification Within the Product Portfolio. Joan snuck in as a panda and quickly trained her lions to eat the department manager. She trained animals for E-level duties, then moved onto the D-level.

This was a laborious process, and since she was no longer on the payroll, she had to sleep in the offices with her father. Other workers who lost their homes were invited into the E- and D-level offices while the training took place. As she completed the D-level animal training she learned from a secretary that her hamster Fidel had expired on the E-level. Her little pet, whose fast wheel-work had sparked this revolution, lay dead in its dynamo, the computer it was powering now completely useless.

She buried Fidel inside her CPU. His image would become the insignia for the revolution.

Once the C-level animals had been set up, she had enough power at her disposal to stage the revolt. Sixty-three lions trained to kill, twenty-eight baboons trained to scratch, and a small army of temp snakes with their own unique defence abilities. They headed for the security zone down in the basement. The plan was that the macaques would wander in there innocently, as though lost, teasing out the amused guards. Then the lions would pounce and maul and savage as many guards as possible.

It was a bloody, victorious battle. Twenty lions were killed and five others were wounded, but the company was useless without its security, so their deaths were seen as heroic, not tragic. The remaining animals took the lifts to the management floors and dispensed with forty-six managing directors, ninety chairmen and one-hundred company stooges. Joan didn’t grandstand at all, even with the company’s founder and leader—she simply dispensed with him as they dispensed with their human workers.

A new order was established, but there was a problem. The animals had become accustomed to their offices and didn’t want to give up their jobs for the human workers. So a compromise was reached—a second company would be built by the animals for the workers, with new jobs for all, and the workers’ paychecks were reinstated.

As head of the company Joan saw the financial foolishness of paying workers for doing nothing while animals slaved to build them a new structure to reinstate their jobs. She had a perfectly good company with free animal labour. The animals loved working there, and were rewarded with fresh food and places to breed and raise their young. Joan had saved the workers’ lives, wasn’t that enough? She aborted the new structure.

There was an outrage. People said Joan had been corrupted by power, and Joan lost her temper. She’d had nothing but grief and moaning from these people, even when she saved their lives. Couldn’t they do anything for themselves and stop hassling her for once? It was her father’s fault she thought this way. Even as a rich co-partner in the company, he was still a nuisance. “Where will the workers go? We can’t pay animals and humans. We’re losing money. We need to make cuts.” So she did.

Joan sacked her father.

Liberated from the nagging insistence of the old man she was free to run the company at her own discretion. After a year, the animals had proved so efficient, there was enough money to open a second structure and give the workers back their jobs. Although she was tempted to fill it with animal workers, her conscience got the better of her. She was unpopular among the humans, of course, and her closest allies were the animals. An enterprising gorilla had worked his way up to be her deputy and her lover.

Animals were more tender, respectful and loyal than humans. Soon after the second building had been constructed, a faction of corrupt humans began to plot against the animals and tried to take over the company. It was exactly what Joan feared might happen. So more lions were bred, and the traitors were dispensed with in a style imitative of the previous company. All humans workers were dismissed. There was no trusting them. It was far safer working with animals who had no concept of greed.

Joan’s company, animal down to the lowliest valet, became the largest grossing company in the world. Sure, there were territorial disputes at times between species, but if she bred them right, there was little incidence of warfare. She hired her father back as a factory worker, because that’s where he was the most comfortable, carping and bitching to the giraffes about his ungrateful daughter. In 2010, the company’s greatest rival lobbied the RSPCA and the company was legally obliged to return its workers to the zoo. This meant either hiring back human workers or declaring the company bankrupt. It was a victory for the company’s biggest rival, who ran a human discontinuation policy modelled on the original company’s own ‘obsolescence’ policy.

Upon receiving this news, Joan fled the country. It is believed she went to live in the Amazon rainforest, or in the Australian outback. She was never heard from again.

Conversations With S. Teri O'Type

To celebrate the release of Christopher Allen’s riotously funny satirical novel Conversations With S. Teri O’Type, I have invited protagonists Curt and Teri to come share my virtual banquette.

MJ: Welcome Curt and Teri. Do you like my banquette? And could you tell me a little about your respective roles in the novel?

Curt: Hey, dude.

Teri: Fam c’est pas trop tôt! A banquette designed with the gay physique in mind. Virtual venison cookies, Batman! Ah, virtual prosecco! I adore you already, whoever you are. Love the accent. May I smoke?

Curt: Hey, dude.

Teri: Curt, honey-darling, please try—who am I kidding?—to be more gayticulate. Introduce yourself. Entertain our host, honey.

Curt: Curt Child. Pleased to meet you, MJ. I’m an accountant in New York City, but I’m originally from North Carolina. I wrote the Conversations to keep track of my progress along the Road to Greater Gayness. Teri here is my gayru.

Teri: Snore. Snore. Virtual snore.

MJ: Um, welcome. Hi Teri. Um, Curt . . . could you tell us—that is, tell me—a little about your journey on the Road to Greater Gayness? What led you to embark on such a metaphorical trip?

Curt: Well—

Teri: Well, just look at him, MJ-honey. He had no choice. One look in the mirror was enough. Does this wrinkled gray suit scream GAY? Do these flaky eyebrows scream GAY? He smells like onions and fried chicken. And take this back fat—

Curt: Let me up. I can’t breathe.

Teri: Curt, honey-darling. You weren’t put on this earth to breathe. You were put here to be the comic relief. Breathing is gravy. MJ—I do love abbreviated names—he really doesn’t get it, you know. Talk about a challenge. This child has more construction sites than Dubai!

MJ: Curt doesn’t need to breathe, Teri, he’s a fictional character. Now, either of you, please tell me the outcome of the Great Belt Loop Debacle.

Teri: You’re preaching to choir, MJ-honey-darling. Tell Mr. Curtis McFurtis here. He’s the one who thinks he needs to breathe. Gay men don’t breathe. We exude.

Curt: MJ, I think I can help you with the—what you’d call it?—the Great Belt Loop Thing. I think that was lesson three. See, belt loops have come a long way since those evenly spaced loops of the 80s. Nowadays we got crazy loops happening all over pants. Double loops, triple loops, slanted loops. Gay men, because we’re trendsetters, are the first to buy pants with loops in odd places. Straight guys miss loops because they don’t expect the loop to be in a different place. Am I right, OMG? You get what I mean, MJ?

Teri: Curt, loop inspection.

Curt: Well, what do you know. Dirnit. I missed one again.

Teri: He’s hopeless. Would you like to adopt him? I’ve brought enough food to keep him alive for a week.

MJ: Have you considered a liquorice belt? It’s both a delicious funtime suck-snack and an effective trouser holder-upper. But enough of that. (Hey Teri, between you and me, how much are you asking for Curt?)

Curt: Hey!

Teri: Buy me a latte macchiato and we’re quits.

Curt: Hey!

Teri: OK, buy Curtastrophe here one too.

Cary Grant: Errrrrrr

Teri: Cary-honey, you know what happens when you drink coffee.

Curt: That liquorice belt sounds nice.

MJ: Sold. I’d like to write Curt into my new sitcom, Two Gays & A Girl. I think it’s a highly original idea that no one has ever done before. Two gay men move into an apartment with a girl who is not gay, and hilarious adventures ensue. There may also be room for a cute pooch in there, and Charlie Sheen. What do you say? Teri, could you direct?

Cary Grant: Errrrrrrr

Teri: Cary Grant won’t work with Sheen. I’ll orchestrate . . . as long as all the actors are attached to strings like marionettes and no one is allowed to eat. Ever. Hmmm. I like—who am I kidding?—the title Two Gays & A Girl, but we’ll have to modify it slightly to Two and a Half Gays. Curt can play the half.

Curt: Hey!

MJ: Umm, why is Cary gnawing on my leg? Now, let’s talk about Conversations With S. Teri O’Type. Oh he’s snapped the ankle off now. Is that normal? Yes, Conversations. Your creator, Christopher Allen. Isn’t he a swell chap? Oh he’s snapped the leg clean off now. Does he think I’m Katherine Hepburn? Oh dear. Do you have a suture, Teri?

Teri: Bad, Cat! Bad, Cat! Cary never attacks without reason. Have you recently been to Botswana? He has a thing for Botswana. Oh, now don’t go bleeding all over us. Who’s going to pay to have this pashmina cleaned?

Curt: Dude, you’re rupturing. Maybe we should move this banquette to a hospital? Just sayin. I’ll grab the weiners.

Teri: Oh, how crass.

MJ: We might not have long left. Or I won’t. Or have. What are your top three tips for those looking to, um . . . ooh, feeling woozy now. What are your top three tips?

Teri: I love the sound of that: toppy tips tips. Moisturize. Moisturize. Moisturize. And don’t ask me again, MJ-Darling. You know I don’t like repeating myself.

Curt: Well, I reckon the main thing is to just be yourself. I know that’s just one tip, but I can’t think of two more.

Cary Grant: Errrrrr. Errrrrr. Errrrrr. 

Conversations With S. Teri O’Type is available from the UK and US and German Amazons. (And Italian and French. And Spanish. That boy gets around).

Little Coffin Boy

                    

[A story whose attempted publication would take up too much of the writer’s precious reading time].

The 1985 hardback edition of Gilbert Sorrentino’s Odd Number wiggled into the library, sweat dripping down his pages, dampness on his spine. He’d shimmied up nine whole stairs to the first level, to the children’s section, and was tuckered. Before him sat row upon row of beautiful children—some worn and battered down the ages, others barely glimpsed at all. He stretched his jacket, ruffled his opening chapters, and proceeded to the first shelf: orphans. His thesis was on the role of the orphan in contemporary humanity, or something like that, he’d still to finalise the focus. Orphans had always fascinated him, especially the rickety, squat urchins of Victorian London. 

Wiggling past the modern orphans with their fat cheeks, Burberry caps and mean mouths, and the pre-war tykes with their grubby faces and cute Cockney tongues, he soon arrived at orphans of the 1800s—a surprisingly poor selection for his needs. He inspected several intriguing specimens: one toothless girl with bloody elbows and a torn rag skirt who said “maw, maw” over and over, and a naked boy with lashes down his back whose eyes rolled up into his skull in haunting intimations of death.

But the 1985 hardback edition of Gilbert Sorrentino’s Odd Number was delighted when his front cover alighted on a proud-looking child in a top hat, braces and dirt-free trousers. His shiny skin, manicured nails and polished brogues seemed an unusual fit for an orphan. “My parents were kidnapped and executed by defectors to Queen Victoria,” he said. “I was held hostage in our estate and taunted by the cowardly killers. They dressed me like a Lord and named me Little Coffin Boy. They forced me to construct my own coffin by cannibalising my father’s precious Edwardian dining table, then lie down inside while they drove a sword through my heart.”

The hardback ruffled its final chapters ferociously, shocked. “I closed my eyes, awaiting my excruciating death. Then a fortuitous occurrence saved me from this cruel fate. Our maid Helena discovered the bodies of my poor mother and father hanging from the chandelier, and gave a bloodcurdling shriek. ‘Murderers!’ she screamed. I tried to save her by sitting up in my coffin and shouting ‘Run!’ but I could no longer move. The executors chased Helena into the bedroom and I chose that moment to make my escape. Helena pled for her life, then screamed as the bastards drove their swords through her flesh. My heart was burning. I felt as though Hell had opened up around me, and the devil himself was waiting behind the front door. I escaped.

“My legs took me into town where I hid for three days behind bordellos and public houses. I shed copious tears for my parents, and came close to taking my own life. I decided, on the fourth day, to sneak into the National Library and install myself as an orphan in their archives. I wanted the world to know my story, and for the memory of my parents, and the shame of these cowardly murderers to be remembered forever.”

A shudder ran down the hardback’s spine. His preface fluttered. He could base his entire thesis around this remarkable orphan, it was quite a story. He closed his pages around the orphan’s foot and led him to the checkout, where the cute 1981 paperback edition of Joyce Carol Oates’s Bellefleur curled her fortieth page at him by way of flirting. The afternoon was looking up! Perhaps he’d have her barcode by the end of the week?

*

I climbed down off the shelf and followed the 1985 hardback Odd Number to the checkout, his car, then back to his depressing study with its one anglepoise lamp and series of sharpened pencils lined up along a ring-stained desk. Third sucker this week. What makes these old hardbacks so gullible? I mean, there’s no adventure anymore, no risk. You sit there with all those whining orphan saps for hours on end, then some dapper dust jacket runs his deckle edges along your thigh, looking for some titillation, or some PhD student, groping for originality, listens to a purple sob story. Then boom! In two hours, I have them on the floor, devouring their contents from cover to cover.

A new challenge is what I need. So that’s why I’m playing it cool for now. See, when the book brings his friends around for a glass of toner or whatever these brainiacs drink, I can make my move and take down three or four at a time. An orgy of dusty hardbacks! I wait on his desk as he clamps me for further information. I find it hard to suppress a smile. “I miss my mother most of all, she gave me her warm milk every night.” He curls his 110^th page in confusion. I love fooling these fools with my sincerity.

Time passes. I grow restless feeding him this bullshit when I can pin him down and read him at any second. It occurs to me that this hardback probably doesn’t have friends. The moment comes at last—it happens after I spin an exhausting historical yarn about my father’s lineage. As he’s scribbling some notes, I leap off the desk and pin him to the floor, forcing open his cover. Usually the hardbacks protest at this point, forcing their cardboard covers shut, but I’m strong. This one doesn’t move at all. Doesn’t twitch. “Read me,” he says. “I don’t mind, read me if you like.”

I loosen my grip. “You aren’t smart enough to fool me. No one wants to be read by force.” He winks his tenth. “I’m different. No one reads me. No one wants me. I don’t mind being read like this. Please read me.” I back off completely—never like this, never. This is too strange. “No, you’re warped. There’s something wrong with you.” He claps his pages together in protest. “No, honestly. I want to be read. Please read me.” I leap off the table, nab a few pencils, and ditch the old pervert. “No way. I’m out of here. Creep.” And I leave, ignoring the light flapping of his pages as I go.

*

He lay there, rocking on his spine, the wan lamplight vulgar on his cover. For hours he abused his pages—scrunching and unscrunching and tearing out the last blank page. It hurt. Little Coffin Boy had reduced him, a twenty-six-year-old hardback, to pulp with his deceit and refusal to read his pages. What good was his thesis now? When more popular hardbacks, like the 1973 edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions were producing papers on German soldiers, or door-to-door salesmen, or Nobel prize winners—in vogue humans. He might as well forget the whole thing. Give up.

A dark night lay ahead. He wiggled to the bestseller neighbourhood, gazing with envy at the Dan Browns and Jeffrey Archers in their mansions, living the good life and getting read day in, day out by adoring humans, while complex souls like him festered in hovels. For an hour, he considered hurling himself into the Discount Bin River, where tired old books go to end their print run before their time. He pictured all  the humans who recoil from his covers. Who demand being returned to their libraries rather than glance upon his unpopular words. He dangled over the river’s edge. It was over.

There was something about the way that hardback pleaded with me. It was eerie. I felt some connection between us . . . something beneath the pages. You don’t bullshit books for ten years without picking up some understanding of a novel’s secret rifflings. I don’t know, it was like I passed up the chance for a new sensation. I’ve never read a book who’s wanted to be read by force before. Wouldn’t that be a change from the same-old same-old—I might discover a ‘forced’ consensual reading makes me feel new things.

I double-back to the hardback’s place. He’s not there. Perhaps this is a trap, and he’s seeking a Police Procedural Manual to ensnare me? I like the danger. Coming close to capture. It’s exciting for sure. Ambling through the streets, past the paperback mansions, I spot him dangling over the Discount Bin River’s edge. Am I too late? I call his name. “1985 hardback edition of Gilbert Sorrentino’s Odd Number! Wait!”

The 1985 hardback edition of Gilbert Sorrentino’s Odd Number leapt up onto its corners in surprise—so the Coffin Boy had returned to humiliate him further? “No use,” he said. “I’m obsolete.” The Coffin Boy held onto the bridge’s ledge, panting. “Wait . . . I want to read you.” A little curl from the hardback. “No use. I won’t be fooled.” He shakes his head. “I mean it. Spread your covers. Let me read you, I want to.”

And so the hardback opened up, letting Little Coffin Boy devour his dusty contents. A long evening began. At first the reader’s eyes glazed over, struggling to follow the unusual formatting. Then the first titter came with a look of perplexity and amusement. He hastily turned the pages, with even more bemused expressions as he progressed. Soon he reached the end. “That was one of the most strange and unique reading experiences I’ve ever had,” Little Coffin Boy said. “Thank you for reading me,” the 1985 hardback edition of Gilbert Sorrentino’s Odd Number said. “I wish more people would.”

  

And the Coffin Boy toddled off back to his library, buzzed at the new sensation. The hardback closed his covers and was never read again. His thesis in orphans was published in April 2012, two weeks before he went out of print.

Man Bites Book

Proposed titles for Jonathan Coe’s new book (or, entries on this year’s Booker longlist):

The Salty Persistence of Malchester Puddleduck

The Tenuous Windmill of Alain de Loofah

The Groovy Kinesis of Bob Forthright

The Lubricious Purdah of Julian Fink

The Glottal Fortune of Zebediah Small

The Vulval Clavichord of Xerxes Ripwinkle

The Dynamic Furtwängler of Paul Starling

The Yogic Putrescence of Alison Shirtsmith

The Cocksure Bobblehat of Lydia Policy

The Dying Dingbat of Derek the Dingbat

The Fizzling Munificence of A.G.P. Archimedes

The Supernumerary Wiffle of Sir Nigel Piddlemiddle

My Toaster Impregnation Hell

Dear Daily Snoop, I have been through an ordeal worse than most of your page-three coke sluts. As such, I want this printed in your paper as it appears below, and I want some money in return. Like up to £1000. Seriously. Address is below, send it before printing. Thanks, Liza.

I woke up one morning pregnant with a toaster. I had been drunk the night before, guzzling down Bacardis like two-to-three an hour, three-to-four every half-hour – whatever – then took this slab of blonde manliness home to screw. What can I say? I have a good time. I’m a hedonist. There’s no crime in that, right? Mind your own business.

So we do it twice, once against the wall, because it’s a good workout on the pelvic muscles and gives you 3D orgasms, then collapse on the bed. In the morning he’s gone, with a note on the table that reads: HADDA DASH HONEY, CALL ME L8R. I vomit over the note, not ‘cause the grammar sucks, because my body wants revenge.

I spend the day in bed, puking into the wastebasket. I try all the remedies – aspirin in the coffee, salmon on the forehead, a bath in ginseng – nothing. The hangover gets worse and worse. Later on I hear these popping sounds in my belly, so I run to the A&E ward. Well, I don’t run – I get a cab, which takes 45 MINUTES to show up, by the way – then I’m made to wait with the other losers while I almost die on the floor.

The doctor performs an x-ray on me and there it is, clear as day on the screen: a fucking great toaster, with actual toast popping out the top! Can you believe this guy? I mean, a one-night-stand foetus I might have forgiven. But impregnating me with a kitchen appliance is so not the right etiquette for hunky blondies built for screwing.

They had to operate on me. I was out cold for three days, and I wake up with this giant stomach scar. The first thing I asked the nurse – a haggard old Korean thing – was: “Where’s the toaster?”

“It not here. Man come and take it away, said it his.”

I almost passed out. Not only had he not come to visit me since this outrageous appliance impregnation bullshit, he’d taken off with my baby! Surely there were laws against this sort of thing? I grilled the Korean lady, but she hadn’t been hired for her knowledge of custody law when it came to non-human offspring. I would have to track down this toaster-thieving putz and take what was rightfully mine.

So I got better (this took two weeks, with nothing but Ironside re-runs and crossword puzzles) and tracked blondie down. When I arrive at his apartment, this little whore is standing over the counter in her panties making toast on . . . hmm, a silver NuWare toaster suspiciously like the one I had in my womb for three days! The whore shrieks and runs into the bedroom as I burst inside and draw blondie’s attention to the toaster.

“What are you doing with this? This belongs to me.”

“I implanted the toaster seed,” he says. He looks hideous in the harsh light of day. I must have been like blind plastered.

“Bullshit. I gave birth to the thing.”

“So I’m the father, you’re the mother. How about we share a slot each?”

“Please. I’m supposed to come around here if I want to toast some bread? I’m taking it home.”

He stands in front of the door. Actually blocks my way as I’m trying to leave. What a psycho!

“I’m not a violent man,” he says. “But if you don’t put down my son, I’m going to hurt you.”

“Oh, fuck you,” I say. I lift up the toaster to warn him, but he kicks the legs out from under me and nabs the NuWare as I fall to the floor. Next thing, he’s dragging me to a box room and pinning me to the bed. I put up a fight, but the guy is like super-human strong and he sticks a needle in my arm. I pass out within a few minutes then wake up strapped to the bed.

The guy is on top of me, butt-naked, his cock hard, and seems to have the notion to start screwing me. Now, I don’t want to paint myself as some psycho slut or something. Don’t get me wrong – I thought the guy was a nutjob – but there was something about being tied up like that, in his power, that made me sort of horny. Usually S&M stuff turns me off, ‘cause the men into it are freaks or losers, but this guy had a proper man-sized wang and screwed like a hydroelectric wind turbine in a hurricane.

When he’s done, I spit in his face, tell him to let me go, warn him to let me go, scream at him to let me go. The guy is clearly unhinged, because he totally ignores me, stuffs a gag in my mouth, and moseys out the door. I can scream pretty damn loud, you know. I woke up half the neighbourhood one time when this little punk pulled his thing out and tried cocking me to the wall. No one ignores my goddamn screams.

About ten minutes later, the slut in panties comes in, wearing a suit which she totally doesn’t pull off – the best clothes for this little whore are no clothes whatsoever – and sits beside me.

“Are you OK?” she asks. My eyes laser her stupidity. “Look, it’s really cool being part of Adonis Inc. Our net profit last month was three times higher than it’s been in years. There are women here who want to experience childbirth without having to take care of an actual child. That’s why being an in utero supplier is a good career move.”

I mmm. My mmm translates as “remove the motherfucking goddamn shitting scotch tape, bitch” or thereabouts. She warns me not to scream then removes the tape.

“Fuck’re you talking about?” I ask.

“Hmm?”

“What supplier? Do you mean he’s knocking up other women with toasters?”

“Oh yes. There are over fifty women in this area alone gestating goods. It means we don’t have to buy them in from a wholesaler, we merely plant the seed then retrieve the item when it’s ready. The women have a pregnancy simulation – of sorts – and that’s their reward.”

“How is letting a fucking toaster grow in your womb the same as a baby?”

“As I said, it’s a simulation.”

“Look, you are clearly insane, so could you please let me go?”

“I’m afraid not.”

She puts the tape back over my mouth. Obviously, this is not what you might call an ethical setup. The blonde whacko is abducting women, impregnating them with his tacky kitchen appliances, and keeping them hostage in his flat or warehouse or wherever. With a team of slut women keeping the hostages in check and crackpot doctors doing the Caesareans.

Couple of days later, it’s obvious that I have another appliance in my womb. This one is massive, though – real monster massive, like a fridge or a cooker or something. I scream a billion insults as the doctor gasses me and puts me out of my misery. Surprisingly, I do actually wake up – I’m not dead – which proves the biggest relief. In the room beside me as I come to is a dishwasher. Blondie stands at the head of the bed, smiling.

“Isn’t it beautiful? Look, it doesn’t have to be this way. Join us. Work for us as a supplier and we’ll pay you a handsome packet.”

“Thought you gave women ‘simulations’. Thought you didn’t pay them,” I say.

“Those are the ones who refuse to participate in our scheme. It’s a handsome scheme, baby. You get all the kitchen shit you need, plus job security and enough screwing to last a lifetime.”

“Screwing. With you?”

“Hell yeah, baby. With me.”

Too drugged to even vomit at the thought, I accept his offer. I have no intention of following through on it, but I say it so he’ll let me off the bed and I can make a run for it. When we go into the kitchen, I have a bite to eat and speak to some of his workers. They tell me they earn up to £300,000 a year, and they get invited to all the coolest parties. I think to myself, that’s pretty cool, maybe I could work for them after all.

Maybe, I also think, the door’s locked.