Terminal Weird [Paperback]

Jack Remick (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 1994

"The stories in Terminal Weird take place somewhere between Hieronymous Bosch's garden of hellish delights and Philip K. Dick's cities of psychotic androids. Jack Remick's sharp, tough, street-wise prose muscles through the smash hits: birth, death, lust, gender and punk rock."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The adolescent-sounding title of Remick's first book of short fiction is perhaps fair warning. The shorter pieces--"Roach," "Monica Metallica," "Python"--are in every sense throwaways, pseudo-poetic or sophomorically gross, and the longer stories often abandon development of plot and character for a quick yuck (either disgust or humor), a "surprise" ending, or a run-on of punctuation-impaired verbiage. But when Remick is not posing or straining, his prose is quick and strong, his eye and sense of humor sharp, his imagination intriguing and his narrative drive admirable, as in the beginning of "Lizard." This "grunge horror" about an immortal hunter of death-lizards reads like Charles Bukowski rewriting Patrick McGrath, but it ends just when it really should get going. "Fish" goes completely overboard into surrealism, obsessive, turgid and gruesome in the manner of Peter Greenaway's films, and like them, a good reminder of why surrealism never really caught on. The good in this collection (some of which is non-genre) promises an interesting writer, but one who has much to learn about verbal and imaginative discipline. The weird for its own sake is terminally boring.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"The writing is raw, magical, surreal, Kafkaesque, Keouistic, wonderful...archetypes blossom, glow, grin and then explode." -- Robert J. Ray, author of The Weekend Novelist

Product Details

• Paperback: 155 pages
• Publisher: Black Heron Press (November 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0930773349
• ISBN-13: 978-0930773342
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,709,220 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

What's behind my novel The Deification?

I grew up in California's Central Valley. The Valley was huge but stifling. If you climbed the town water tower one foggy night and the cops hauled you down, it made the local newspaper. Your one goal was a customized car with a flame job and flipper hubcaps. You wore Levis or Chinos and you cut your hair short. And then along came Jack Kerouac and On The Road. Right behind him came William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Philip Lamantia, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and, of course, Allen Ginsberg. And everything changed overnight.

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Herb Caen wrote about these crazy people living in dens of iniquity in North Beach. He called them "Beatniks". He took the term from Kerouac who used it to mean Beatitude, but Caen mixed it up with Sputnik and a whole generation was born.

The craziness of the Beatniks was magnetic to boys hungry for Nirvana. Along with my other rebellious friends I headed to the City (on the West Coast, San Francisco is-The City), to see what was happening in North Beach. We camped outside the Blackhawk and the Jazz Cellar. We lived for the weekends and City Lights Bookstore where we bought the Beat Bibles--On The Road, Junkman's Obbligato, Howl. We ran up and down Grant and ate Chinese food in bombed out restaurants, we stayed in crazy wino hotels in the Mission District because the rooms were cheap and the inn-keeper didn't mind half a dozen doped up teenage hunger artists sharing a room. It was, in a word, exciting to come alive, to rise out of the mind-numbing mind-set of death in life.

On The Road and the Beatniks set me free. Get out of the Valley, they said. Go find your America. And some of us did. Zooming back to the Valley stoned and giddy with wine and words, I knew I wanted to be a poet, be a writer, see the world. So I did.

This novel, The Deification, is homage to those wild men whose vision of the world opened up the social revolution of the 1960s. They changed everything. They changed me. They changed you and you probably don't even realize it.

The publisher, Coffeetown Press is shooting for a release of The Deification to synch with the release of the film version of On The Road coming in December, 2011.

The Deification is the first book of The California Quartet. All four novels are slated to appear under the Coffeetown Press imprint. The Deification will arise on December 10th, 2011. You can buy the novel with a pre-publication order from Coffeetown Press.

I'm a novelist and poet.
I have just signed a multi-book contract with Coffeetown Press to bring out all of the California Quartet as well as Gabriela and the Widow.

Tentative release date for The Deification, the first of the California Quartet is set for December 1, 2011.

What is The California Quartet?

In the four novels of the Quartet, I take a different approach to the serial novel. Instead of tracing the life and times of a single set of characters, I draw four archetypes that I develop from adolescence to adult men. The novels track the development of boys into men so the quartet traces the arc of a life.
In each novel, the spiritual subtext of redemption (through art or politics) drives the protagonists each hoping to find transcendence and release from the horror and terror of life.
In Either/Or, we watch adolescent boys, who know nothing and who are victims of a world gone crazy, as they search for the rules to life.
In Book of Changes, the adolescent boys have become young men, university students, on the road to knowledge as they acquire life-tools and as they learn the hard lessons of deception, death, and betrayal.
In The Deification, the adolescent genius, obsessed with his art, discovers that his gift isn't a means to salvation but a call to blood shed.
In Trio of Lost Souls,flawed, wounded, and damaged men look for a way to act on the world. They know how the game is played, they can change the world around them.

The long arc for these four novels is from the adolescent innocence of Ricky and Linard, who know nothing about how the game is played and are content to let the world act on them, to Vincent and Garrett who find that the power of politics gives them the tools they need to change the world with the flick of a pen. Aware of how tenuous life is, these men realize they can never escape their anguish, they can only try to keep others from falling into the same traps they themselves fell into.
The California Quartet is built on a series of plot tracks and jump cuts with restricted points of view. Using the jump cut the way a film editor uses it, I wanted to build four stories on a sequence of associated scenes linked to the story line for each novel with no attempt to create a seamless narrative. I wanted a Whitmanesque gruffness in both structure and style.

I recently tried some e-publishing. Throwback and Other Stories is my first attempt at Kindle and Create Space paperbacks.
Readers can find my other work on Amazon:
Blood, A novel
Lemon Custard: The Novella and Screenplay Adaptation
Josie Delgado, A Poem of the Central Valley.
Black Madonna in Blue: A screenplay