Nut Jobs Author Extra Quality -
Literature needs its nut jobs. They are the prospectors who dig in the dangerous, collapsed mineshafts where the sane novelist fears to tread. Nine times out of ten, they find only fool’s gold—a 900-page screed about the gender of angels. But that tenth time? That tenth time, they bring back a piece of ore that glows with a strange, new light. They expand what a sentence can do, what a story can contain, what a mind can believe.
Because the Nut Jobs Author offers something that the well-adjusted novelist cannot: certainty in the face of chaos . The sane novelist asks questions. The nut job provides answers. Ugly, beautiful, terrifying, stupid answers. When the world feels random—when politics is a farce and the news is a horror show—there is a perverse comfort in diving into a fully realized alternate reality, even a psychotic one. nut jobs author
But the true Nut Jobs Author does not live in the past. They are publishing right now, on obscure presses or Amazon Kindle Direct, sending screeds to literary magazines that delete them unread. Literature needs its nut jobs
This author has found The Answer . It might be about time travel, the Fibonacci sequence in Shakespeare, or the fact that the CIA killed Kurt Cobain using a subliminal frequency hidden in a Barney the Dinosaur episode. The Systematizer’s book is not a story; it is a proof. The prose is dense, filled with diagrams, footnotes that refer to other footnotes, and a cast of characters that includes the author himself as a persecuted hero. Think on a bad week, or the anonymous authors of the Principia Discordia . They demand you see the pattern. And after 600 pages, you start to. That’s the scary part. But that tenth time
The reader of the nut job author is an anthropologist of the extreme. We are looking for the boundary where belief becomes art and art becomes madness. We want to touch the electrified fence.