D. Harlan Wilson

Dr. Identity

They Live

Steve Beard

Jeremy Robert Johnson

Carlton Mellick III

Bruce Taylor

Gina Ranalli

Andre Duza

John Edward Lawson

Kevin L. Donihe

Vincent W. Sakowski

The Bizarro Starter Kit  (Orange)

For a professor at Corndog University it's quite acceptable to purchase a robotic dopplegänger and have it teach your classes for you. But how does it reflect on your teaching skills when your dopplegänger murders the whole class? Follow the Dystopian Duo (Dr. Blah Blah Blah and his robot Dr. Identity) on a killing spree of epic proportions through the irreal postapocalyptic city of Bliptown where time ticks sideways, artificial Bug-Eyed Monsters punish citizens for consumer-capitalist lethargy, and ultraviolence is as essential as a daily multivitamin.

In this collection of stories, D. Harlan Wilson deconditions the boundaries of reality with the same offbeat methodology that energized his first book The Kafka Effekt. Stranger on the Loose is an absurdist account of urban and suburban social dynamics, and of the effects that contemporary image-culture has on the (in)human condition. These stories operate on a plane of existence that resists, and in many cases breaks, the laws of causality. Parrots teach college courses. Fl?neurs impersonate bowling pins. Bodybuilders sneak into people's homes and strike poses at their leisure. Passive-aggressive glaciers and miniature elephant-humans antagonize the seedy streets of Suburbia. Apes disguised as scientists reincarnate Walt Disney, who discovers that he is a Chinese box full of disguised Walt Disneys . . . Wilson's imagination is a rare specimen. The acorns of his fiction are planted in the soil of normalcy, but what grows out of that soil is a dark, witty, otherworldly jungle.

Stranger on the Loose

D. Harlan Wilson returns with another ferociously mindbending collection of short fiction. Masked in absurdity, these stories reveal the horrifying and hilarious faces of everyday life. Wilson tells of egg raids, hog rippers, monk spitters, fathers who take their children to pet stores to buy them whales, sociopaths who threaten to clothesline eternity, and the simple act of the story itself becoming a means of repetitive, endless torture. Put on your goat head, hop in your hovercraft, and take a ride with a juggernaut of modern imaginative fiction.

They Had Goat Heads

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. 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 named Mr. Blankety Blank, who stalks from house to house throughout the Vulgaria leaving a bloodbath that would make Jack the Ripper himself blush.

A Memoir of Vulgaria

Blankety Blank

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.

The Kafka Effekt

In Pseudofoliculitis City nothing is as it seems and everything is as it should be. Today's forecast calls for extreme confrontation, with sandwich flurries and the threat of handlebar mustaches to the west. By turns absurd and surreal, dark and challenging, Pseudo-City exposes what waits in the bathroom stall, under the manhole cover and in the corporate boardroom, all in a way that can only be described as mind-bogglingly irreal.

Pseudo-City

Born out of the cultural flamboyance and anxiety of the 1980s, They Live (1988) is a hallmark of John Carpenter's singular canon, combining the aesthetics of multiple genres and leveling an attack against the politics of Reaganism and the Cold War. The decision to cast the professional wrestler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper as his protagonist gave Carpenter the additional means to comment on the hypermasculine attitudes and codes indicative of the era. This study traces the development of They Live from its comic book roots to its legacy as a cult masterpiece while evaluating the film in light of the paranoid/postmodern theory that matured in the decidedly "Big 80s." Directed by a reluctant auteur, the film is examined as a complex work of metafiction that calls attention to the nature of cinematic production and reception as well as the dynamics of the cult landscape.

Sequel to: Dr. Id-entity, or, Farewell to Plaquedemia.

Code Name Prague

In Technologized Desire, D. Harlan Wilson measures the evolution of the human condition as it has been represented by postcapitalist science fiction, which has consistently represented the body and subjectivity as ultraviolent, pathological phenomena. Operating under the assumption that selfhood is a technology--i.e. a creative projection from the body encompassing everything from language to electronic machinery--Wilson studies the emergence of selfhood in philosophy (Deleuze & Guattari), fiction (William S. Burroughs' cut-up novels and Max Barry's Jennifer Government), and cinema (Army of Darkness, Vanilla Sky, and the Matrix trilogy) in an attempt to portray the schizophrenic rigor of twenty-first century mediatized life. We are obligated by the pathological unconscious to always choose to be enslaved by capital and its hi-tech arsenal. The universe of consumer-capitalism, Wilson argues, is an illusory prison from which there is no escape--despite the fact that it is illusory.

Selfhood and the Body in Postcapitalist Science Fiction

Technologized Desire

Prophetic short stories and apocalyptic novels like The Crystal World made J. G. Ballard a foundational figure in the British New Wave. Rejecting the science fiction of rockets and aliens, he explored an inner space of humanity informed by psychiatry and biology and shaped by Surrealism. Later in his career, Ballard's combustible plots and violent imagery spurred controversy--even legal action--while his autobiographical 1984 war novel Empire of the Sun brought him fame. D. Harlan Wilson offers the first career-spanning analysis of an author who helped steer SF in new, if startling, directions. Here was a writer committed to moral ambiguity, one who drowned the world and erected a London high-rise doomed to descend into savagery--and coolly picked apart the characters trapped within each story. Wilson also examines Ballard's methods, his influence on cyberpunk, and the ways his fiction operates within the sphere of our larger culture and within SF itself.

D. Harlan Wilson

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