Veins [Kindle Edition]

Drew (Author)

Book Description

VEINS is a tragicomedy novel about 22 years of a man's life in the middle of Ohio. The first novel by Drew, writer of the long-running comics Toothpaste For Dinner and Married To The Sea. Dark, weird, and funny.

"For my whole life I've had 0 friends or 1 friend, which sounds sad. But in binary, that's all of them."

"Sandpaper is like life. If it wasn't rough, it wouldn't be worth anything."

Product Details

• File Size: 205 KB
• Print Length: 147 pages
• Publisher: Sharing Machine; Second edition (April 6, 2011)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B004W8D8JQ
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #106,956 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 43 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Hilarious, and sad, and hilarious again. Mostly sad. April 18, 2011

By Bret W Dawson

Mostly I think of Drew as a joke machine. Every night at midnight he posts a perfect blast of the funny at toothpastefordinner.com, with an additional funnyblast at marriedtothesea.com. The man is hilarious. He's been promoting Veins as a comic novel. Which it is, in as much as it's a novel and it's funny.

But Veins is sad. God, it's sad. It's heartbreaking. It had me rippling with laughter, and I like it for that. I love it for the heartbreak.

42 of 44 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Far more than you expect April 21, 2011

By Just call me "Dude"

VEINS is a surprising book. When I bought it, I expected it to be a humor book, as described. While it was absolutely hilarious, I wasn't expecting it to be anything more than that. When I put the book down, however, I felt like I had just gotten up from a conversation with an actual person telling me their life story. I could envision the main character across from me, maybe at a booth in an Arby's, grabbing curly fries out of a bag with stubby fingers and dipping them into a jar of arby's sauce. I could imagine him rattling off all of his ideas and observations about the world, never bothering to make eye contact. It was a moving, personal experience. You don't only read a book when you read VEINS. You get to know a person. A person who sees the world differently than anyone else. A person desperately trying to understand a world that doesn't try to understand him. I cannot emphasize this enough: VEINS is far more than you expect. Read it.

33 of 35 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Story of Identity and Loneliness April 20, 2011

By R. Stroffolino

After reading "Veins" I didn't know what to think. There are moments of hilarity that make you laugh out loud, but there are also moments of sadness that broke my heart. It took me a couple days of reflecting to finally determine my ultimate conclusion. Drew uses a series of vignettes to explore how identity, or lack there of, effects one mans life. The protagonist dreams of being known as "Dude" yet is denied this act of recognition, instead he is known by a name he utterly rejects, Veins. Its in this failure to assert a self made identity and rejection of a communal one that shape Dude. Because he has no identity he also never finds a social standing, a place to fit, either in school or with his family. Ultimately his perceptions of others are made based on external conditions, he does not know of anyone's internal motivations that are not explicitly show externally, nor does he seem to know that he his missing this form of empathy. This allows him to form an odd amorality, his moral view is always skewed, not noticeable at first, but always leading to consequences down the road. Its this that ultimately marks the work as tragic, Dude has an inability to see outside of himself and is ignorant that this is a singular condition.