The Kafka Effekt is D. Harlan Wilson's debut book, a collection of forty-four short stories loosely written in the vein of Franz Kafka, with more than a pinch of William S. Burroughs sprinkled on top. A manic depressive has a baby's bottom grafted onto his face; a hermaphrodite impregnates itself and gives birth to twins; a gaggle of professors find themselves trapped in a port-a-john and struggle to liberate their minds from the prison of reason-these are just a few of the precarious situations that the characters herein are forced to confront. The Kafka Effekt is a postmodern scream. Absurd, intelligent, funny and scatological, Wilson turns reality inside out and exposes it as a grotesque, nightmarish machine that is always-already processing the human subject, who struggles to break free from the machine, but who at the same time revels in its subjugation.
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 CODENAME PRAGUE, THEY HAD GOAT HEADS, PECKINPAH: AN ULTRAVIOLENT ROMANCE, TECHNOLOGIZED DESIRE: SELFHOOD & THE BODY IN POSTCAPITALIST SCIENCE FICTION, DR. IDENTITY, and others. Visit me online at www.dharlanwilson.com and dharlanwilson.blogspot.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
