PARKING LOT Thunder sounded, getting closer, and Justin picked up his pace, spearing trash off the road and dumping it into a gigantic plastic bag. By court order, he had to wear this glow-in-the-dark vest with the words Community Service on the back, and pick up the roadside litter tossed by the ecologically retarded citizens…

It had stopped raining. I saw a fox in the garden hide something. From where I stood it looked like a shoe with a foot still in it. I thought perhaps the fox wanted to hide the foot for his brood and he wanted it to rot a little because, who knows, perhaps foxes like…

Ty rented a tiller from True Value, lugged it in his truck, went out to the back and pushed, the tiller digging up the grass like angry antlers. He saw his neighbor John over the fence, waving with his gloves on. John was retired, and sometimes Ty saw him at the Eagles, a club for…

The sports gene I get from my dead father. He returns to me now as a scent. Water-logged leaves. He’s the tetherball attached to my pole, the flying trapeze of my soul. He runs a bar tab, then turns to me and says let’s hit the road, son. And when I argue with him about…

In court, he could not care less about the woman who was unable to make amends with her husband, and who weekly drapes herself across his grave and claws at the earth, fills her fingernails with sod. He does not care about the bereaved father’s desire to inscribe his own tombstone, “He died of a…

Did you think a pencil drew a horizontal where the sea became clouds? Or a scalpel cut the petals from their green backdrop? Or the perfect vertical of the sill was inked using a pot of shade and crow quills? And did you believe we can divide you/line/me, or past/cut/future? We are a volume in…

I asked a lot of my favorite writers to contribute to Necessary Fiction in this, my month as writer-in-residence. Writers whom I’ve long admired for the “wildness” of their writing and by that I mean: daring, surprising, open. Steve Himmer said it very well in his kind introduction, that reading my book, Wild Life, was…

“Lovecraft had in fact always been a racist” [Against the world, against life Pg 103] This is the first sentence in Houellebecq’s chapter entitled: “Racial Hatred”. Houellebecq continues: “But in his [Lovecraft’s] youth this racism did not go beyond what was acceptable within his social class – that of the puritanical Protestant old bourgeoisie of…

‘Art altogether is nothing but a survival skill, we should never lose sight of this fact, it is, time and again, just an attempt — an attempt that seems touching even to our intellect — to cope with this world and its revolting aspects, which, as we know, is invariably possible only by resorting to…

Here’s part two of my essay on Michel Houellebecq: From the very first sentence in Against the world, against life Houellebecq is clear in his intent: “Life is painful and disappointing.” [Pg 27] Like Lovecraft, Houellebecq sees no value in modern life. He splits us into two separate camps and from the outset, and again…

‘At first glance, the preoccupation of the writer who writes in order to be able to die is an affront to common sense. It would seem we can be sure of at least one event: it will come without any approach on our part, without our bestirring ourselves at all; yes, it will come. That…