Rutger Van Trout has worse problems than his mundane existence in the all-consuming, all-suppressing Vulgaria of Grand Rapids, Michigan. It's not that his son might be turning into a werewolf, or that his daughter might be a nymphomaniac. The problem does not lie in his obsession with transforming his middle-class estate into a three-ring barnyard, nor in the shrunken head collection under the bed. He doesn't even mind his wife's (possibly) haunted skeleton or the freak-of-the-week superheroes and window-jumpers populating his neighborhood.
The complication has invaded his community in the form of a new breed of serial killer, one who stalks from house to house throughout the Vulgaria leaving a bloodbath that would make Jack the Ripper himself blush. The killer's name is Mr. Blankety Blank, and Rutger Van Trout's neighborhood is on the wrong end of a killing spree...
With three offbeat story collections and the indescribably madcap Dr. Identity (2006) to his credit, Wilson has been duly anointed as speculative fiction’s most unpredictable stylist. Here he flouts all novelistic conventions and propriety in recounting the misdeeds of a serial killer known only by a name written in blood on the walls of his victims’ manicured homes—Blankety Blank. In the mid-twenty-first century, the American landscape has morphed from suburbia into “vulgaria,” featuring neighborhoods replete with shopping malls and oversized McMansions. Quiggle Estates resident Rutger Van Trout just wants to enjoy his newly built silo in peace, without the added distractions of a nymphomaniac daughter, a werewolf-obsessed son, and a wife haunted by her own skeleton. Then Blankety Blank leaves his trail of blood across vulgaria, and it’s up to Rutger and Quiggle Estates’ odd assortment of faux superheroes to save everyone. Wilson sprinkles his rapid-fire narrative with glib aphorisms, absurdist pseudo-historical tidbits, and outlandish digressions that leave a reader breathless. Although this isn’t everyone’s cup, iconoclasts will relish every word. --Carl Hays
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Review
In Blankety Blank fact and fiction don't so much blur as they collide like lovesick Sumo's fired at each other from cartoon cannons, resulting in a pseudo-biographical romp interspersed with fictional histories, strange quotes, haikus, and plain ludicrously fun happenings. --Fractal Matter
Wilson sprinkles his rapid-fire narrative with glib aphorisms, absurdist pseudo-historical tidbits, and outlandish digressions that leave a reader breathless. Although this isn't everyone's cup, iconoclasts will relish every word. --Booklist, August 2008
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
I'm a novelist, editor, literary critic, and English prof. My stories have appeared in magazines, journals and anthologies across the world in several languages. My books include THE SCIKUNGFI TRILOGY, THEY HAD GOAT HEADS, PECKINPAH: AN ULTRAVIOLENT ROMANCE, TECHNOLOGIZED DESIRE: SELFHOOD & THE BODY IN POSTCAPITALIST SCIENCE FICTION, and others. Visit me online at www.dharlanwilson.com and www.thekyotoman.com.
Here's what some other authors and reviewers have said about me and my writing:
"Wilson has been duly anointed as speculative fiction's most unpredictable stylist." BOOKLIST
"If reality is a crutch, D. Harlan Wilson has thrown it away." RAIN TAXI
"A bludgeoning celluloid rush of language and ideas served from an action-painter's bucket of fluorescent spatter, PECKINPAH: AN ULTRAVIOLENT ROMANCE is an incendiary gem and very probably the most extraordinary new novel you will read this year." ALAN MOORE
"CODENAME PRAGUE is from the wild edge of science fiction, in the tradition of Philip K. Dick's Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch--fast, smart, funny, and full of a scarily plausible vision of just how weird things could get if we take our biological fate into our own hands." KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
"This intense mixture of giddy activity, cyberpunk essences, avant fusion and social satire may make your head spin at an accelerated rate. Actual brain damage is unlikely, in most cases." JOHN SHIRLEY
"CODENAME PRAGUE is a thrill-a-minute combination of James Bond, Robert Ludlum, and cyberpunk, set in a dangerous, erotic, and not-as-distant-as-you'd-wish future." MIKE RESNICK
"Who IS this guy?" PAT CADIGAN
"DR. IDENTITY is a rollicking romp through a future so absurd, it can't help but feel real. D. Harlan Wilson shows us everything we know--but wish we didn't--about ourselves." ROBERT VENDITTI
"Let's dispense with the usual predictable analogies ('Kafka/Cronenberg-on-laughing-gas'), redundancies ('Phillip K. Dick/William Gibson-on-acid'), or accurate-but-somewhat-obscure references ('the most intense and, in a certain sense, the most significant young prose writer since Mark Leyner and Ben Marcus ... establishes Wilson as the Steve Katz of the post-everything generation ... vies with Derek Pell's THE LITTLE RED BOOK OF ADOBE LIVEMOTION for being the funniest book of the new millennium'), and cut to the chase: D Harlan Wilson's hilarious meta-pulp SF novel, DR. IDENTITY, is a funhouse mirror whose cartoonish distortions continually amaze and amuse--until one realizes that what we're seeing is a disturbingly accurate vision of ourselves. An instant avant-pop classic by a major new talent. Two surgically-enhanced, stainless-steel thumbs way, way up!" LARRY MCCAFFERY
"This book's better'n the bushelfull of Benzedrine-spiked donut holes with which DR. IDENTITY tries to bribe his students into civilized demeanor! Pomo cybertheory never tasted so good or made you fly this high!" AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW
"Readers with a taste for wacky experimental fiction will enjoy D. Harlan Wilson's DR. IDENITY, OR, FAREWELL TO PLAQUEDEMIA, a pulp science fiction novel set in the postcapitalist city of Bliptown." PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"'Destroy time so that chaos may be ordered' was the instruction more than half a century ago of Mailer's Man Who Studied Yoga and D. Harlan Wilson has taken that advice seriously; here is a novel which implodes and conflates autobiography, biography, history, quasi-history, alternate history and Occam's Safety Razor in a fashion which I find utterly original and utterly discommoding. The exquisite tilt of BLANKETY BLANK runs us all off the board and on; its originality is a weapon. Firing at that bullseye on time." BARRY N. MALZBERG
"If you had a time machine and could secure the living brains of James Thurber and Andre Breton ripped untimely from their skulls, run them through a juicer, then mainline the blended liquid neurons, you might become a writer like D. Harlan Wilson. In fact, I know with certainty that this is how he actually got his start. As evidenced by his new 'Memoir of Vulgaria,' BLANKETY BLANK, we are facing a writer who can evoke howls of pity and tears of laughter on the same page, and generally within the same sentence. In this 'multimedia' novel, suburban inanity and insanity are depicted in loving and intimate depth, resulting in a furiously animated canvas equal parts Bosch and Tex Avery. Imagine an episode of The Simpsons scripted by Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme, then directed by Michel Gondry, and you won't be far off the mark. If this be "interstitial" fiction, then it's a case of the interstices expanding like a galaxy to overwhelm whatever bland shores once flanked them." PAUL DI FILIPPO
This book would be close to one of the best books I read this year. It's really unusual. It takes reality to strange new places. Truth and lies blend into one superbly written `memoir' about Blankety Blank, a serial killer in the suburbs. I used this for a case study at uni this year for an essay on postmodern representations of suburbia. The way it reaches out for those pure, idealistic 1950s suburban ideals, yet completely misinterprets them/bastardizes them, it led me to conclude that this book is about the death of suburbia in contemporary cultures. Examining the book in that context really opened it up to new perspectives for me. The first time I read it was just for the pure absurd fun of it. Sure, the warped consumerist undertones are there, but it wasn't until I studied it at some level that I realised just how sophisticated and clever it was. I mean, I already knew it was brilliant and sophisticated and clever, but it is fantastically beyond just about everything else I've read this year. It is not just a bizarro book, it is an ultraviolent parody of the American Dream, something that people seem desperate to hold on to, but realistically, they never will.
I have lived in a suburb much like Vulgaria and I must say Wilson has it right. The people in these neighborhoods get stuck in their little identity/property wars not only with their neighbors, but with themselves. In everyone of these neighborhoods there is a serial something (peeper, vandalizer, dirty mouth, etc), all of them have the disturbing power to rock these people out of their little identity ruts. Wilson's serial killed does what the other serial (vandalizer, peeper, and dirty mouth) can't, he destroys the vulgar imaginary world these people live in. In other words, Wilson hates these neighborhoods as much as I do. I highly recommend starting here if your new to Wilson's work. This is also a great place to get introduced to the growing Bizarro genre.
