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288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
The truth was scarier: nobody in there knew what the fuck was going on. Or else everybody was right and it was all true: aliens and archetypes and asuras, psychosis and psionics, hellfire and hallucinations.
Pandemonium.
The thing’s inside my head, Mom, and it’s trying to get out.
We’d understood from high school on that it was Lew’s job to make good grades, find a high-paying career, buy a two-story house in the suburbs, and generally become Dad. It was my job to fuck up. Occasionally this annoyed me, but most of the time I was comfortable with the division of labor.Even in moments of drama, desperation, and despair, Del can't relinquish the wordplay. A few Del-isms:
And now we were lost. Or rather, the world was lost. The GPS told us exactly where we were, but had no idea where anything else was. Permanent Global Position: You Are Here.
She was seventy, seventy-five years old, a small bony face on a striated, skinny neck: bright eyes, sharp nose, and skin intricately webbed from too much sun or wind or cigarettes. She looked like one of those orphaned baby condors that has to be fed by puppets.
There was no bathroom: no bath, no room, not even room for a bath. From the smell, the walls were insulated with old fish wrap.
The coffee was terrible and the bacon was ordinary, but the pancakes were avatars of some perfect Ur-cake whose existence until now could only be deduced from the statistical variations in other, lesser pancakes.
Hope wasn’t a thing with feathers, it was a hundred-pound ball and chain. All you had to do was drag that sucker to the edge and throw it over first.
Maybe everyone in the world was this inconsistent, this fragmented. All we could see of each other—all we could see of ourselves—was a ragged person-shaped outline, a game of connect-the-dots without enough dots.