In early 2016, someone I know self-published a book. A deliciously pretentious, poorly edited monstrosity called The Human Café. I call it a monstrosity because it’s the perfect example of a writer’s first completed novel, the kind you’re proud of for a year and then furiously hide in your sock drawer, hoping it’ll never see the light of day. The book is very ambitious, but the problem with ambition is that when you’re young and just starting to figure out what sort of writer you want to be, you don’t always know how to tell your ambition to fuck off, and you wind up biting off more than you can chew.
What is this book about, you ask? Hell if I know, because the author himself doesn’t even know.
Below the cut you’ll find a sporking of J.D. Miller’s Kickstarter that began it all, my comments being in vicious editor red and Miller’s in bold. I plan to spork the entire novel, but the Kickstarter itself is practically a novel on its own, so I figured I’d start there.
When I started this book, I honestly didn’t know where it was going or where it would end. I didn’t know the main characters, their wants, their needs, their interests, their histories. I didn’t know where I’d be when I finally got to the end of it, where it would have taken me. I didn’t know what it would do to me, or the impact that it would have on the people who read it first. I didn’t know it would change my outlook on life and storywriting. I didn't expect it to be so autobiographical. In short, I didn’t expect it to hurt and I didn’t expect it to change anything. So really, I guess I expected it to be just like any of the other stories I’d written. Only it wasn’t.
I’m not sure why any of this is important. This is literally how a vast majority of novels start out. It doesn’t tell you why this particular one is so special that you should donate your money to it.
It began…
I know he thinks he’s being cute here, but when I’m deciding whether or not to donate my money to a project, I just want to be sold on the product. I don’t care why you wrote the book. I don’t care how it began. I just care about the actual book, and why or why not I should give you my money.
...with a black notebook, brand new and store-scented, and with the bold, black words at the top of the page: The Human Café. The words that followed really didn’t ask permission. They were distinct and genuine and honest and probably said what everyone was thinking:
Burn after reading.
"That's horrible," Lana declared. "It sounds like you're eating people.""Yumm," said Caesar. "Humans!"
And that was that.
We’ll ignore that he didn’t properly format the dialogue here, because, to his credit, these two lines have both characters speaking in separate paragraphs in the actual novel. But aside from the fact that I already hate the one who calls himself Caesar, this didn’t answer my questions at all. When you read the title The Human Café, what does that make you think of? Personally, it conjures a Clive Barker-esque nightmare where the owners have smiles that seem just a little off and the meat in your pasty tastes a little too sweet (What is that tangy aftertaste, exactly?), and the booth you’re sitting in has sharp edges carved into the wood that look like teeth if you stare too closely.
But no, sadly, there are no bloodbath-infused cafés of madness to be found in these waters. Here, there be something called the human condition, which honestly just makes me want to puke.
(At this point I feel like I should probably note: This book does not contain actual cannibalism in any form. I apologize in advance for any disappointment this may cause. It does, however, contain: Oceanic Storms, Diner Coffee, Secret Agents, Romantic Gardens, Christmas Lights, An End-of-the-World and a Queen (also featuring unrelated appearances by Frank Sinatra and Beowulf).
I don’t even know what to say to this. None of these things go together, and I can’t imagine any organic way they could. But ignoring that, listing random things that happen to play a part in your novel is not enticing enough to sell a whole novel. Where is the plot? What is the conflict? Who are these characters I should care about? He’s lucky he has very loyal friends and family members who stopped this campaign from flopping.
In the words of E.L. Doctorow, “[Writing] is like driving a car at night. You never see further than the headlights but you can make the whole trip that way.”
Nothing says ‘I can write’ like using a much better writer’s words to speak for you.
To be perfectly honest, I didn't know what this book even was until I'd reached the end of it.
That’s weird to me. I feel like you should know what you’re writing by the time you’ve finally reached the end of it. If you don’t, I think that says more about you as a writer and the work you produce than anything else.
When it showed up, I didn't know what to think. I just knew that it tasted different than any other I'd written, that there was something strange about it. And as it grew, it grew in its own, unexpected ways. That restless seed drank in all the insomnia and all the insecurity (and resulting caffeine) and sprouted into something I'd never expected. It seemed sharp and blunt at the same time, witty but honest. It was shorter than other stories I'd written, but it far outweighed them.
10/10 times, any time I see a writer call his own work witty, it’s DOA.
To be honest, I didn't hope for much. But I was excited.
And that's when my best friend snatched it up and gulped it down and let it crack her open.
This is perhaps the most awkwardly I’ve felt while reading about a writer describe someone else reading their work. I’ve made a few individuals cry through writing, but it never ‘cracked them open’. How far up your own ass do you have to be to say something like that about your own writing? I am honestly embarrassed for him.
It was raw and it was real (for the first time, beautiful). Then another friend took it, and another. I'd known it was different from the beginning; for the first time, it was a story that had the power to hurt me. And it did, in many ways. It was a story that, at its base, was human (something that, until then, I'd always struggled to accomplish). It was something that could (possibly) transcend the words that it was contained in.
How did this book hurt J.D. Miller, you ask? BECAUSE IT WAS SO RAW. But seriously, he never elaborates on why it was such a painful work to bring into the world, and nothing in the book itself is ever handled with genuine enough pathos to warrant all this angst over ‘rawness’ and ‘realness’.
If anything, half of the Kickstarter seems to be Miller waxing on poetic about his writing process, which is ironic because it isn’t even a crazy process like Honoré de Balzac allegedly drinking 50 cups of coffee a day. To put it in a blunt and somewhat crass way, this is the literary equivalent of a man enjoying the smell of his own farts.
It could do what I'd always wanted my writing to do: Mean something to someone.
I’m not sure why he’s put so much emphasis on this. Isn’t that what almost every writer in the world wants? We want our words to have meaning. Did he wake up one morning and think he was the lone writer who finally had this revelation?
The characters had outgrown their pages. They had real voices and real weight and it really did hurt when they cried, at least they hurt me, and infused with a kind of reality that I found myself already in the middle of.
Of course your characters hurt you. They’re your characters, and they mean more to you than they would to the average reader. So what if they made you cry? That’s like me telling an agent that my book made my mom cry. No one cares.
They had quirks and passions and fears and for the first time, something fantastical had become something real, to me.
You sure like to talk about how the book made you feel a lot more than you talk about the book itself, which, I dunno… you’re supposed to be selling to me here.
It's not perfect. I know that. (But in some ways, I think it's almost better that it's not, as though somehow being perfect would illegitimize* its claims to humanity). But it's real.
It’s true that humanity is never perfect. But a book is not a human being. It is a product put forth by a human being, and as such, it’s to be expected that it will be a flawed product in some way. No book can be perfect to all readers. But you should want to put forth the best book you possibly can because you owe that much to yourself and to the people potentially taking the time out of their lives to read your work, and claiming that you’re glad your book isn’t perfect because it somehow makes it more real that way just makes you look like an idiot.
This is a piece of me, on display. A piece that inspired me to take up long-boarding and ukulele and read poetry and nurse my caffeine addiction to new heights and run into the ocean laughing and get salt in my mouth. It's the life that I've seen, the reality that I've witnessed and learned. It's my first foray into something real, and it's changed me more than I ever knew it could.
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*whether it's a word or not, it really should be.
I’ll call up Websters and get right on that for you.
So what exactly is the Human Café about?
Please, do tell! Because I read this book two years ago and I never really did get an answer.
I've been asked this question dozens of times, and I really wish that it wasn't such a reasonable question, because then I wouldn't feel so lame when I don't have a proper answer. But the problem is that the more personal something becomes to you, the more impossible it becomes to summarize to someone else.
NO.
This is part of being a writer. I was just talking to someone the other day about how obnoxious it is to write query letters and boil down a million subplots to one central plot. IT SUCKS. But tough titties. It’s literally your job to make sure you can do this.
My typical answer to the question is "Well, it’s complicated”—and it is—“It’d probably be easier if you just read it”—it would be. But summarize I must, so summarize I shall:
This is a story about a boy, and the corner of the booth, in the corner of the café, that is his home. It is about the friends he shares it with after school and about the notebook that he slowly fills beside them.
It is about love and laughter, the kind that holds back the heartbreak. It is about beauty and a puddle of human chaos. It’s about freckles and maple syrup, werewolves and hurricanes, fast cars and hand-holding, gravestones and orange soda. It’s about sunshine and scars and a great deal of ink, about losing things in finding things. It is, in short, a story about life in this Human Café.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN.
Ok, first part is simple, if not terribly dull, enough. Boy and friends spend all their time in a café while he writes in his notebook. Already I don’t give two shits, but I’m thinking at this point that it’s probably some terrible slice-of-life. But then we’re talking about werewolves and orange soda and syrup and hurricanes, and it just drives home the fact that the author either has no idea how to summarize his work in the most basic way possible, or he has no plot to begin with.
Or worse, and in this case, both.
It's the story of a writer and the stories he writes and the people he writes them for. It's about how he changes and how he doesn't, about what he sees and what he learns and what he's afraid of, all wrapped up in the searching and the chaos of a creative mind. It's a story about the nature of pain, the nature of joy, and the danger of escaping.
I smell a self-insert.
It's about an Atlantian Queen, and the mysterious stranger who arrives on her shores with the strangest cargo she has ever seen...
…What.
It's about a man who has spent a lifetime running from monsters...
Whaaaaaa…
It's about a Secret Society of women who all share the same name...
What does this have to do with a café and a boy?
It's about paradoxes and time travel and the faithfulness of a painter's daughter...
It's about an infatuated young man and what he found behind the walls of a garden...
It's about a hidden race of undying beings, and the death of the one man who could keep them from overthrowing mankind...
It's about the retired father-of-three that the government can't let out of its sight...
But mostly, it's about a boy and his friends and a hospital rooftop in Oklahoma.
At this point, you may be confused. But honestly, I think the author may be too.
It's a blend of down-to-earth fiction, dark fantasy and fast-paced sci-fi, witty romance and heavy drama, tied together by characters who live and breathe and feel and only sometimes get along. It has a little bit of everything, really. While it may be geared toward the Young Adult audience, it stands apart from the love-triangle-drama-driven-forbidden-infatuation-obsessed genre it shares. It's an attempt to reach into a largely childish and ultimately hopeless stage and setting of literature with a purpose and with a hope behind it.
And here is where Baaar really gets pissed. Shitting on an entire genre doesn’t make the genre look bad; it just makes you look bad. Because even the worst YA novels I’ve read are better than the drivel you shoved into the world. And do you know who you just insulted above? Not only every author who writes Young Adult fiction, which is immensely hard to write well in the first place, but every reader who bought those books and loved them. It isn’t our place to tell readers what they should and shouldn’t be reading, especially if we can’t even summarize our own books.
And I'm not sure I have more to say than that.
YOU HAVEN’T SAID ANYTHING AT ALL.
The Point
There is none.
"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." -Earnest Hemingway
So, this happens to be one of my favorite quotations of all time, and I think it does apply to many writers in a way that can be deeply uncomfortable. But it’s not appropriate here. A Kickstarter is meant to showcase your work, not someone else’s. Especially not the words of a man who is arguably considered one of the greatest American writers of all time. YOU ARE NOT HEMINGWAY. YOU WILL NEVER, IN A MILLION YEARS, BE HEMINGWAY.
Really, art is nothing more than pain shared. Vulnerability. You're taking a piece of you, sometimes an aching, throbbing piece, and you're putting it on display. You're packaging it and giving it away. In that sense, art should hurt. It hurts if you mean it. Stories are art just as much as art is story.
I strongly disagree, and this is coming from someone who uses her writing to battle crippling depression. I believe that art should say something, but saying something meaningful doesn’t mean you have to suffer for it. A work can be beautiful without being destructive or chaotic. You don’t necessarily have to bleed to write a good book. It certainly didn’t help this book any.
I don't think I really understood this until the Human Cafe crawled into my head, tossing and twisting until every last bit of it was on paper. I had to pull it out of my veins and dig up all its secrets in a very glorious sort of demolition. It devastated me in the most beautiful way.
In case you haven’t guessed by now, there is nothing ‘devastating’ about this book. It certainly tries to be devastating, and that’s the most devastating part, that it tries so hard to say something beautiful and raw and aching while managing to not say anything meaningful at all.
I said earlier that this book changed my outlook on life, as well as storytelling. In truth, it turned out far more autobiographically than I ever intended, or even realized. I wasn't writing to an audience though; I was writing for the characters, and to understand something for myself.
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Oh, and as a bonus, here’s the unintentionally hilarious back cover, which wound up being my favorite part of the entire book:
The chaotic beauty of a writer’s mind is opened up in this debut novel about a boy named Ted, his best friends Lana and Caesar, and the corner booth of the quiet café that is their after-school home.
Featuring werewolves and waffles, hurricanes and hand-holding, dying Atlantian bloodlines and Oklahoman hospitals, this analysis of the nature of life and pain contrasts an exploration of fantasy with the splendor of everyday life and love in an unpredictable and beautiful world.
Literary gold, people.
What is this book about, you ask? Hell if I know, because the author himself doesn’t even know.
Below the cut you’ll find a sporking of J.D. Miller’s Kickstarter that began it all, my comments being in vicious editor red and Miller’s in bold. I plan to spork the entire novel, but the Kickstarter itself is practically a novel on its own, so I figured I’d start there.
When I started this book, I honestly didn’t know where it was going or where it would end. I didn’t know the main characters, their wants, their needs, their interests, their histories. I didn’t know where I’d be when I finally got to the end of it, where it would have taken me. I didn’t know what it would do to me, or the impact that it would have on the people who read it first. I didn’t know it would change my outlook on life and storywriting. I didn't expect it to be so autobiographical. In short, I didn’t expect it to hurt and I didn’t expect it to change anything. So really, I guess I expected it to be just like any of the other stories I’d written. Only it wasn’t.
I’m not sure why any of this is important. This is literally how a vast majority of novels start out. It doesn’t tell you why this particular one is so special that you should donate your money to it.
It began…
I know he thinks he’s being cute here, but when I’m deciding whether or not to donate my money to a project, I just want to be sold on the product. I don’t care why you wrote the book. I don’t care how it began. I just care about the actual book, and why or why not I should give you my money.
...with a black notebook, brand new and store-scented, and with the bold, black words at the top of the page: The Human Café. The words that followed really didn’t ask permission. They were distinct and genuine and honest and probably said what everyone was thinking:
Burn after reading.
"That's horrible," Lana declared. "It sounds like you're eating people.""Yumm," said Caesar. "Humans!"
And that was that.
We’ll ignore that he didn’t properly format the dialogue here, because, to his credit, these two lines have both characters speaking in separate paragraphs in the actual novel. But aside from the fact that I already hate the one who calls himself Caesar, this didn’t answer my questions at all. When you read the title The Human Café, what does that make you think of? Personally, it conjures a Clive Barker-esque nightmare where the owners have smiles that seem just a little off and the meat in your pasty tastes a little too sweet (What is that tangy aftertaste, exactly?), and the booth you’re sitting in has sharp edges carved into the wood that look like teeth if you stare too closely.
But no, sadly, there are no bloodbath-infused cafés of madness to be found in these waters. Here, there be something called the human condition, which honestly just makes me want to puke.
(At this point I feel like I should probably note: This book does not contain actual cannibalism in any form. I apologize in advance for any disappointment this may cause. It does, however, contain: Oceanic Storms, Diner Coffee, Secret Agents, Romantic Gardens, Christmas Lights, An End-of-the-World and a Queen (also featuring unrelated appearances by Frank Sinatra and Beowulf).
I don’t even know what to say to this. None of these things go together, and I can’t imagine any organic way they could. But ignoring that, listing random things that happen to play a part in your novel is not enticing enough to sell a whole novel. Where is the plot? What is the conflict? Who are these characters I should care about? He’s lucky he has very loyal friends and family members who stopped this campaign from flopping.
In the words of E.L. Doctorow, “[Writing] is like driving a car at night. You never see further than the headlights but you can make the whole trip that way.”
Nothing says ‘I can write’ like using a much better writer’s words to speak for you.
To be perfectly honest, I didn't know what this book even was until I'd reached the end of it.
That’s weird to me. I feel like you should know what you’re writing by the time you’ve finally reached the end of it. If you don’t, I think that says more about you as a writer and the work you produce than anything else.
When it showed up, I didn't know what to think. I just knew that it tasted different than any other I'd written, that there was something strange about it. And as it grew, it grew in its own, unexpected ways. That restless seed drank in all the insomnia and all the insecurity (and resulting caffeine) and sprouted into something I'd never expected. It seemed sharp and blunt at the same time, witty but honest. It was shorter than other stories I'd written, but it far outweighed them.
10/10 times, any time I see a writer call his own work witty, it’s DOA.
To be honest, I didn't hope for much. But I was excited.
And that's when my best friend snatched it up and gulped it down and let it crack her open.
This is perhaps the most awkwardly I’ve felt while reading about a writer describe someone else reading their work. I’ve made a few individuals cry through writing, but it never ‘cracked them open’. How far up your own ass do you have to be to say something like that about your own writing? I am honestly embarrassed for him.
It was raw and it was real (for the first time, beautiful). Then another friend took it, and another. I'd known it was different from the beginning; for the first time, it was a story that had the power to hurt me. And it did, in many ways. It was a story that, at its base, was human (something that, until then, I'd always struggled to accomplish). It was something that could (possibly) transcend the words that it was contained in.
How did this book hurt J.D. Miller, you ask? BECAUSE IT WAS SO RAW. But seriously, he never elaborates on why it was such a painful work to bring into the world, and nothing in the book itself is ever handled with genuine enough pathos to warrant all this angst over ‘rawness’ and ‘realness’.
If anything, half of the Kickstarter seems to be Miller waxing on poetic about his writing process, which is ironic because it isn’t even a crazy process like Honoré de Balzac allegedly drinking 50 cups of coffee a day. To put it in a blunt and somewhat crass way, this is the literary equivalent of a man enjoying the smell of his own farts.
It could do what I'd always wanted my writing to do: Mean something to someone.
I’m not sure why he’s put so much emphasis on this. Isn’t that what almost every writer in the world wants? We want our words to have meaning. Did he wake up one morning and think he was the lone writer who finally had this revelation?
The characters had outgrown their pages. They had real voices and real weight and it really did hurt when they cried, at least they hurt me, and infused with a kind of reality that I found myself already in the middle of.
Of course your characters hurt you. They’re your characters, and they mean more to you than they would to the average reader. So what if they made you cry? That’s like me telling an agent that my book made my mom cry. No one cares.
They had quirks and passions and fears and for the first time, something fantastical had become something real, to me.
You sure like to talk about how the book made you feel a lot more than you talk about the book itself, which, I dunno… you’re supposed to be selling to me here.
It's not perfect. I know that. (But in some ways, I think it's almost better that it's not, as though somehow being perfect would illegitimize* its claims to humanity). But it's real.
It’s true that humanity is never perfect. But a book is not a human being. It is a product put forth by a human being, and as such, it’s to be expected that it will be a flawed product in some way. No book can be perfect to all readers. But you should want to put forth the best book you possibly can because you owe that much to yourself and to the people potentially taking the time out of their lives to read your work, and claiming that you’re glad your book isn’t perfect because it somehow makes it more real that way just makes you look like an idiot.
This is a piece of me, on display. A piece that inspired me to take up long-boarding and ukulele and read poetry and nurse my caffeine addiction to new heights and run into the ocean laughing and get salt in my mouth. It's the life that I've seen, the reality that I've witnessed and learned. It's my first foray into something real, and it's changed me more than I ever knew it could.
*whether it's a word or not, it really should be.
I’ll call up Websters and get right on that for you.
So what exactly is the Human Café about?
Please, do tell! Because I read this book two years ago and I never really did get an answer.
I've been asked this question dozens of times, and I really wish that it wasn't such a reasonable question, because then I wouldn't feel so lame when I don't have a proper answer. But the problem is that the more personal something becomes to you, the more impossible it becomes to summarize to someone else.
NO.
This is part of being a writer. I was just talking to someone the other day about how obnoxious it is to write query letters and boil down a million subplots to one central plot. IT SUCKS. But tough titties. It’s literally your job to make sure you can do this.
My typical answer to the question is "Well, it’s complicated”—and it is—“It’d probably be easier if you just read it”—it would be. But summarize I must, so summarize I shall:
This is a story about a boy, and the corner of the booth, in the corner of the café, that is his home. It is about the friends he shares it with after school and about the notebook that he slowly fills beside them.
It is about love and laughter, the kind that holds back the heartbreak. It is about beauty and a puddle of human chaos. It’s about freckles and maple syrup, werewolves and hurricanes, fast cars and hand-holding, gravestones and orange soda. It’s about sunshine and scars and a great deal of ink, about losing things in finding things. It is, in short, a story about life in this Human Café.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN.
Ok, first part is simple, if not terribly dull, enough. Boy and friends spend all their time in a café while he writes in his notebook. Already I don’t give two shits, but I’m thinking at this point that it’s probably some terrible slice-of-life. But then we’re talking about werewolves and orange soda and syrup and hurricanes, and it just drives home the fact that the author either has no idea how to summarize his work in the most basic way possible, or he has no plot to begin with.
Or worse, and in this case, both.
It's the story of a writer and the stories he writes and the people he writes them for. It's about how he changes and how he doesn't, about what he sees and what he learns and what he's afraid of, all wrapped up in the searching and the chaos of a creative mind. It's a story about the nature of pain, the nature of joy, and the danger of escaping.
I smell a self-insert.
It's about an Atlantian Queen, and the mysterious stranger who arrives on her shores with the strangest cargo she has ever seen...
…What.
It's about a man who has spent a lifetime running from monsters...
Whaaaaaa…
It's about a Secret Society of women who all share the same name...
What does this have to do with a café and a boy?
It's about paradoxes and time travel and the faithfulness of a painter's daughter...
It's about an infatuated young man and what he found behind the walls of a garden...
It's about a hidden race of undying beings, and the death of the one man who could keep them from overthrowing mankind...
It's about the retired father-of-three that the government can't let out of its sight...
But mostly, it's about a boy and his friends and a hospital rooftop in Oklahoma.
At this point, you may be confused. But honestly, I think the author may be too.
It's a blend of down-to-earth fiction, dark fantasy and fast-paced sci-fi, witty romance and heavy drama, tied together by characters who live and breathe and feel and only sometimes get along. It has a little bit of everything, really. While it may be geared toward the Young Adult audience, it stands apart from the love-triangle-drama-driven-forbidden-infatuation-obsessed genre it shares. It's an attempt to reach into a largely childish and ultimately hopeless stage and setting of literature with a purpose and with a hope behind it.
And here is where Baaar really gets pissed. Shitting on an entire genre doesn’t make the genre look bad; it just makes you look bad. Because even the worst YA novels I’ve read are better than the drivel you shoved into the world. And do you know who you just insulted above? Not only every author who writes Young Adult fiction, which is immensely hard to write well in the first place, but every reader who bought those books and loved them. It isn’t our place to tell readers what they should and shouldn’t be reading, especially if we can’t even summarize our own books.
And I'm not sure I have more to say than that.
YOU HAVEN’T SAID ANYTHING AT ALL.
The Point
There is none.
"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." -Earnest Hemingway
So, this happens to be one of my favorite quotations of all time, and I think it does apply to many writers in a way that can be deeply uncomfortable. But it’s not appropriate here. A Kickstarter is meant to showcase your work, not someone else’s. Especially not the words of a man who is arguably considered one of the greatest American writers of all time. YOU ARE NOT HEMINGWAY. YOU WILL NEVER, IN A MILLION YEARS, BE HEMINGWAY.
Really, art is nothing more than pain shared. Vulnerability. You're taking a piece of you, sometimes an aching, throbbing piece, and you're putting it on display. You're packaging it and giving it away. In that sense, art should hurt. It hurts if you mean it. Stories are art just as much as art is story.
I strongly disagree, and this is coming from someone who uses her writing to battle crippling depression. I believe that art should say something, but saying something meaningful doesn’t mean you have to suffer for it. A work can be beautiful without being destructive or chaotic. You don’t necessarily have to bleed to write a good book. It certainly didn’t help this book any.
I don't think I really understood this until the Human Cafe crawled into my head, tossing and twisting until every last bit of it was on paper. I had to pull it out of my veins and dig up all its secrets in a very glorious sort of demolition. It devastated me in the most beautiful way.
In case you haven’t guessed by now, there is nothing ‘devastating’ about this book. It certainly tries to be devastating, and that’s the most devastating part, that it tries so hard to say something beautiful and raw and aching while managing to not say anything meaningful at all.
I said earlier that this book changed my outlook on life, as well as storytelling. In truth, it turned out far more autobiographically than I ever intended, or even realized. I wasn't writing to an audience though; I was writing for the characters, and to understand something for myself.
Oh, and as a bonus, here’s the unintentionally hilarious back cover, which wound up being my favorite part of the entire book:
The chaotic beauty of a writer’s mind is opened up in this debut novel about a boy named Ted, his best friends Lana and Caesar, and the corner booth of the quiet café that is their after-school home.
Featuring werewolves and waffles, hurricanes and hand-holding, dying Atlantian bloodlines and Oklahoman hospitals, this analysis of the nature of life and pain contrasts an exploration of fantasy with the splendor of everyday life and love in an unpredictable and beautiful world.
Literary gold, people.