Dermaphoria
Clandestine chemistry and the LA underworld provide the atmosphere for this kaleidoscopic tale of lost memories and the heartbreak of finding them, from the author of ‘The Contortionist’s Handbook’.When Eric Ashworth wakes in jail, he has no idea how he got there, or why. His only memory is a woman's name: Desiree.Released on bail and holed up in a low-rent motel, Eric starts to piece together his former life as a chemist at the centre of a desert drug ring with the help of a powerful new hallucinogen which simultaneously loosens his grip on the present. As the events of his past begin to emerge from the confusion of his fragmented memory, Eric must contend with a gnawing paranoia and the need for ever-increasing fixes – not to mention disturbing visits from an intimidating police detective, his former associate Manhattan White and the ominously named Toe Tag. As his grip on reality becomes more tenuous, past and present, reality and fantasy begin to bleed into each other, bringing this visceral, shifting novel of love and loss to its climax.
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From the reviews of Dermaphoria:
‘An experimental adventure … What makes this worth reading is Craig Clevenger’s extraordinary prose: the pleasure of text is everything’
Guardian
‘It’s dizzying stuff, and the seedy LA underworld is potent in its heat and squalor; no wonder Chuck Palahniuk is singing his praises’
Metro
‘What makes the book so unique, so compulsively readable, is Clevenger’s ability to make complex images seem so unforced’
Independent on Sunday
‘Playful, intellectual, carefully formed and stunningly executed’
Sunday Business Post
‘Part noir detective thriller, part crystal meth fuelled freak-out through bug-infested motel rooms, Nevada diners and low-rent strip joints’
Dazed and Confused
To JILL NANI
We, amnesiacs all, condemned to live in an eternally
fleeting present, have created the most elaborate of human constructions, memory, to buffer ourselves against the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible passage of time and irretrievability of its moments and events.
—GEOFFREY SONNABEND
Obliscence: Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter
From the first day I saw her I knew that she was the one
As she stared in my eyes and smiled For her lips were the colour of the roses That grew down the river, all bloody and wild
—NICK CAVE
“Where the Wild Roses Grow,” Murder Ballads
I PANICKED AND SWALLOWED A HANDFUL OF FIREFLIES AND BLACK WIDOWS the inferno had not. Shiny glass teardrops shattered between my teeth while the fireflies popped like Christmas bulbs until I coughed up blood and blue sparks, starting another fire three inches behind my eyes and burning a hole through the floor of my memory. A lifetime of days, years, minutes and months, gone, but for a lone scrap, scorched and snagged on a frayed nerve ending and snapping in the breeze:
Desiree.
Hard as I try, a given recollection’s pictures, sounds and smells, synchronized and ordered first to last, are everything but, swarming back through the cold hole in my brain where they hit the waning light and crackle into smoke. Others wait until dark to show themselves. I can hold a picture’s fragments together for a lucid half second before a light shines through my eyes and they scatter, slipping between my brain’s blackened cracks. One memory after the next turns yellow at the edges and crumbles to flakes at my touch.
I smell rotted pulp, old newspapers crawling with silverfish, the dank, dissolving bindings of books I don’t remember reading. The stench gives me chills that turn to sandpaper on my neck and shoulders. My back burns if I lean the wrong way and I feel bandages but I can’t touch them. My wrists and feet are cuffed to a chair in a room built to the stark schematics of my own head. Peeling walls the color of fingernails, cement floor, an overhead light with an orbiting moth. I’m alone with three machines. Two are on pause behind me, a third speaks into a telephone near the door.
“I miss you, Snowflake…I love you too…bunches…bunches and bunches…yes, Mommy too,” his baritone whisper like the rumble of a distant train.
The machines are good. Whoever made them has all of my respect. Stunning detail in their faces, each loaded with a databank of behaviors for random interval display, all manner of mannerisms from coughs to sniffs, synthetic-cartilage knuckle cracks, biting lips and picking nails. The odor of static, the electric smell from a bank of new television sets gives them away.
“When I get home…okay, I will. Love you…bye bye, Snowflake.” Faint dial tone, the ping ping of the doomed but determined moth against the lightbulb, then the machine sits in front of me.
“My daughter’s been sick and I’ve been on overtime.” He speaks to me as though I’m a sleeping child and he’s about to kiss my forehead. He slides a cigarette from a pack with gold foil and some French name I can’t pronounce.
“Haven’t seen her for three days.” The snap of his chrome lighter chimes like a coin hitting the pavement. “You smoke?”
He’s engineered for sincerity and affection. The two behind me hide their eyes behind dark glasses, but his are exposed and big, liquid brown, radiating trust along with his voice. He wears an oiled-back, matinee-idol haircut and a tailored suit the deep blue of beetle wings and from across the table my eyes can feel the fabric, soft as a baby bird’s throat. He’s wired to smell like breath mints, cigarettes and expensive aftershave.
