Fugitive Tendencies
5/27/2006 @ 1:37 pm Comments OffCraig Clevenger has a near pathological soft spot for people who disappear. Scroll through his protagonists, and witness. Damaged junkie savant John Dolan Vincent erases and reboots his identity every eighteen months to stay clear of the system, to avoid materializing on any legal or medical database. Heartsick meth alchemist Eric Ashworth splashes down through the atmosphere of his own consciousness on page one, his memory wiped by a self-administered overdose of a drug designed by his own hand and most of his surface skin scorched off by an inferno of his own making. The ghost voice narrating Clevenger’s as yet blooming third novel, meanwhile, suffers a slow irreversible fade from the physical plane, recounting in mild tone but excruciating detail the symptoms of a genetically transferred syndrome featuring a progressive irreversible molecular decay that does not kill him but leaves him invisible to others. Like the kid with a magnifying glass crouched over a flat rock with the sun to his back, Clevenger is fascinated with his characters, and loves them on some primordial level, but he isn’t afraid to burn them. Sometimes, though, I wonder if Clevenger is pulling a John Dolan of his own, a self-inflicted fade…
For the unabridged version of Fugitive Tendencies, check out the new back pages of the paperback edition of The Contortionist’s Handbook (Harper’s UK, 2006).
godspeed,
-wcb
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