Product Description

Bailed out of jail and holed up in a low-rent motel, amnesiac Eric Ashworth’s only memory is a woman’s name: Desiree. With steadily increasing doses of a strange new hallucinogen, Eric finds that the drug allows him to reassemble his past in broken fragments. But as he begins to lose touch with the present, his distinction between truth and fantasy begins to crumble, creating a world where divisions between love and loss, violence and tenderness, and fact and fiction are less discernible than they ought to be.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #92367 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-08
• Released on: 2006-09-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 214 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781596921023
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Clevenger's second novel (after 2002's The Contortionist's Handbook) opens with a classic grabber: an amnesiac man awakes in jail with a woman's name—Desiree—on his lips. Prodded by a pushy police detective, that man (his name is Eric Ashworth, he's told) must sift through the contents of his drug-addled brain to explain his only memory: "A ball of fire rising from a flaming house. Nails melting like slivers of silent wax. Beams and shingles collapsing into a pile of burning dust...." Released on bail, Eric checks into a flophouse and attempts to separate his ongoing drug hallucinations from reality. To aid him in this quest he turns to the doubtful promise of yet another drug, a powerful hallucinogen known on the street as Skin, Cradle or Derma. Eric's trip toward understanding, as well as the reader's, twists through exotic visions that may or not be real. It's a long, painful process, but eventually Eric puts it all together and learns who he is—and the terrible thing that he's done. This is a sometimes brilliant, heavily stylized novel whose psychedelic prose and labyrinthine story line will enthrall some readers and enrage others. At one point Clevenger counsels both Eric and the reader: "Anything is possible and nothing is possible. They're the same thing." Yes, that's it exactly. (Oct.)
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Review
...reminiscent of William Gibson's work, but Clevenger has his own attitude and a film-noirish literary style that is unique. -- San Francisco Chronicle, August 28, 2005

Clevenger’s trademark voice and pace are as good as ever, but the settings are his greatest triumph. -- Santa Barbara Independent, October 6, 2005

Dermaphoria advances Clevenger’s dark art, powerfully evoking the paranoia of a man attempting to reconstruct his life. -- San Francisco Magazine, November 2005

Gloriously shifty puzzle-fiction whose resolution is much less important than the kaleidoscopic journey towards it. -- Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2005

Review
Praise for Craig Clevenger:

“I swear to God this [The Contortionist’s Handbook] is the best book I have read in easily five years. Easily. Maybe ten years.”
–Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club and Choke

“Clevenger has produced an utterly persuasive and compelling novel, combining the zest and enthusiasm of a new voice with the craft and the guile of a veteran.”
–Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting

Customer Reviews

"Your sleeping breath brushes my face and blows the ashes from my memory."
Eric Ashworth, creative chemist, with a touch of entrepreneurial genius and a craving for exotic drugs, awakens in an L.A. jail, badly burned, thinking he's in Hell. He has amnesia. Poor guy can only remember the name "Desiree," but cannot recollect who or what the moniker is attached to. His knack for remembering past experiences is so shot, in fact, that the first cop he speaks with has to tell him his own name.

Eric's learned memory is also effected. He is able to recall some chemical formulas, the concept of profit and loss, and still possesses a minor ability to devise better ways to zone people out through the wonders of modern chemistry. However, he had been "unique" before the lab explosion, and the overdose that erased eight seconds worth of his gray matter. Ashworth is "irreplaceable" to those who hired him. He had possessed brilliance - the ability, perhaps, to cure diseases like cancer. Instead he chose to design and produce recreational drugs. Discovered and backed by big bucks from an underworld honcho, Eric and his multitude of skills went to work, producing and distributing drugs. He received, and still does, dire threats from a toady thug and his retarded, violent son as to what they will do to him if he blows the job - literally and figuratively.

There is an image that occasionally flashes across his mind. "A ball of fire, half the size of the house itself rose to the sky. Beautiful." "Between the flash and the roar, there wasn't any space at all."

Ashworth's lawyer, whom he doesn't remember meeting, bails him out of the clink and takes him to a low rent dive, Hotel Firebird, Room 621, where his neighbors are pimps, whores, buyers, sellers, and lots of bugs. I gather from the psychedelic narrative that the bugs are both the creepy crawly kind that bite, (occasionally painted in day-glo colors - or viewed through day-glo colored retinas), and also the kind people wear taped to their bodies - "tapeworms." Eric samples a mysterious new drug called "Skin," "Cradle," or "Derma" that synthesizes the sensations of touch, and allows him to time-travel inside his skull for weeks. Due to Skin, or the slow, inevitable return of his memory, or both, he begins to recall his life as a clandestine criminal chemist and his relationship with Desiree, his fortune telling lover. Perhaps he would have been better-off to have remained an amnesiac.

Craig Clevenger can sure write!! I have highlighted and book-marked phrases and paragraphs throughout the novel to go back and reread. I may not have understood as much about our protagonist as I would have liked, or empathized with him a whole lot at times, but the author's heavily stylized, wired prose is exceptional - no doubt about it! I will say that the parts of the narrative dealing with Ashworth's childhood, his parents and his fear of violent storms is brilliant and very sensitively handled. Other characters are introduced here: fellow residents of Hotel Firebird, Jack and the Beanstalk, their friend Donna, Detective Ainslinger, Manhattan White and his sicko son, even Desiree - but they all just move on by. I'm in Eric's head and everyone else is a blur.

As for the storyline, the reader is carried along on sheer manic energy, at times moving with the beat and allowing meaning to rush past - like some terrific 60's acid rock song - or trip. (My age is showing!). I am glad Mr. Clevenger kept the page number at 212. I couldn't have run with him much farther. But it was a really good trip.

I am reminded here of Will Christopher Baer's "Kiss Me Judas." Although I like the character of ex-cop Phineas Poe more than Eric Ashworth, I am sure if the two ever met, they'd get along very well. I bet their respective creators would also.

I have not read "The Contortionist's Handbook" but plan on doing so soon. Craig Clevenger is extremely talented and I hope his new novel does as well as it should, based on merit! Kudos!
JANA

One of the finest and edgiest authors writing today.
What an experience. Dermaphoria has easily jumped into my top ten novels list. The writing is pure brilliance, the words had an instantaneous impact on my mental and physical state of being. At times I think I hallucinated, and had to reread sections to convince myself that what I read was real.

Freakin' amazing, I don't know how else to say it. I'm going to push this book hard on people -- it deserves to be read by everyone, if only to show them the power that words can have when used by a master. I enjoyed this even more than The Contortionist's Handbook, and that is no small feat.

If you enjoyed Dermaphoria or The Contortionist's Handbook, you may also like the works of Will Christopher Baer. Thank you Craig!

More Than Skin-Deep
I was going to start this review by comparing Clevenger's writing to that of Chuck Palahniuk and Will Christopher Baer. He's got the pace and acerbic plot-mind of one and the visceral, dizzying prose of the other. Then I flipped to the acknowledgements, and there, on the second paragraph, Clevenger thanks them both. "Well, no wonder," I thought. Fans of either (or both) Palahniuk and Baer are bound to love "Dermaphoria."

Clevenger starts with a classic (and almost trite) premise: a man wakes up in a hospital, and the only thing he knows is one name -- Desiree. The man (Eric Ashworth) -- sought after by info-hungry cops, antsy attorneys, and dispassionate mobsters -- attempts to piece together his life, bit by bit, around that one name, using both old-fashioned persistence and a new street drug. The substance, called Skin, synthesizes the sense of touch, using it to extract reality-rich remembrances from an ever-expanding history ("Having more memory is just a way of distorting a greater amount of the past," says one character). The only problem? Skin comes with some pretty serious side effects. And, furthermore, who's to say that the results are 100% accurate?

One part mystery, one part noir, and every bit of it a puzzle of firey, arresting prose, "Dermaphoria" is a great book. Ashworth's disorientation is made all the more palpable by Clevenger's crackling writing. Some might find the descriptions over-written, but I'd say he hasn't written enough. This 214 page novel is a quick read, ending faster than it takes a firefly to blink. Clevenger's descriptions are hefty and mobile, apt and stunning, and everything is slathered with import (even the names themselves, Ashworth and Desiree and others, are totems for a larger point). This book is about more than just drug overdoses and regrets, and like his contemporaries (even more so than Palahniuk, I'd say), Clevenger refuses to dilute his tale with bromides or easy outs.

However, even if you don't have the inclination to dig beneath the topsoil of Clevenger's mesmerizing world, you can still enjoy the lusciously dirty surface. It's a tale that is rewarding on multiple levels, superficial or subliminal, and although the ending is chaotic and heart-breaking (Clevenger's male protagonists never seem to catch a break), it also proves there's a real heart there to be broken. Dark, smart, gritty, and spare, "Dermaphoria" gets under the skin and stays there. You should read it, and then read it again.

In case you forgot anything.