01.01.70
, By Justin Chin. Manic D Induce, 122 pages, $14.95 paper.
Fierce. Funny. Grungy. Chin’s fiction debut – after memoirs, poetry collections and playing scripts, six books in all – is a mesmerizing mashup, in 11 interconnected stories, of sex and extravagance, drug highs and emotional lows, heartache and hilarity. All in possibly 40,000 words, a marvel of compression, a short novel jammed with wit, defiance and desperation. On the surface, Chin is a jokester, his narrator dropping unsullied gems of absurdist imagery. Like: Being clawed to death by pandas could be the cutest eradication ever. And: Cum has the consistency of “the unnamed white stuff that you might find on tables in vegetarian restaurants.” But, not even meriting the humor, beyond the irony, Chin’s narrator is a man baffled by love, striving for relevance, learning how to evade demons and to appreciate, oh, two-ply toilet paper, the disposition of cats and “time of my own.” At his most depraved, the narrator exults in excreta – “Snow” may be too much for readers with over-ladylike sensibilities. At his most elegiac, he transforms a monstrous world into something lustrous and defenceless.
Source: SouthFloridaGayNews.com