Novels

 An Angel of Sodom is the title short novel, which is followed by 13 short stories, by David Vardeman, long neglected, long at work, always writing. Now that he is published a unique and frankly indescribable author has come to haunt the literary milieu with is perverse, absurd, realist, Midwestern, US American, human being tales of people who generally go about their mundane quotidian while navigating the most difficult task of all–living sanely. In each story, the characters seem to be confounded by the banality of normal, while the undertow of an unglimpsed all-powerful strange tugs at them.

What they don’t notice, luckily Vardeman does. His writing provides a variety of pleasures, including humor and puzzles that prick the intellect to discomfort, but his primary talent lies in providing endless surprise. Not a page goes by without unpredictable reactions, urges, indabas, insights, petty cruelties, odd moments of tenderness–which in this world are indeed odd, and not likely to last.

 Letters of Thanks concerns a case of supposed witchcraft and demon possession in Boston, 1688. The incident serves as a prelude to the more famous witch trials of Salem and Andover 4 years later. The Puritan Minster Cotton Mather, takes into his home a 13 year old girl, Martha Goodwin, recently cursed by condemned witch Goody Ann Glover. The intransigent “witch” is condemned to death on specter evidence. Mather strives to save her soul. Meanwhile he and members of his congregation work to release Glover’s victim, Martha, from her supposed state of demon possession. His efforts work to the detriment of his reputation and the corruption of his home life, as will his influence over the Salem trials several years later.

 Book 1 in a series of six planned books. In the way it embellishes the implications of quantum physics in a narrative context, this series may be considered literature’s first true multiverse novel, existing as a superposition of ever bifurcating and contradictory moments lived and relived within a greater web of experience that cumulatively suggests the macro-/micro-cosmic nature of our own universe. The story situates fully-developed characters believably within a schlocky 50s B science fiction plot.

 Book 2 in a series of six planned books. In the way it embellishes the implications of quantum physics in a narrative context, this series may be considered literature’s first true multiverse novel, existing as a superposition of ever bifurcating and contradictory moments lived and relived within a greater web of experience that cumulatively suggests the macro-/micro-cosmic nature of our own universe. The story situates fully-developed characters believably within a schlocky 50s B science fiction plot.

Oskar Submerges is the first true sea novel ever set on a Jovian satellite. The interplanetary year is 2193. With the help of a massive inheritance, Cletus II of Luna, aspiring kapellmeister, has taken a job as a janitor in an infamous brain health clinic on Europa, ice world of entheogens and polysexual cyborgs, seeking inspiration and artistic actualization in the abjection to be gained from proximity to end-of-life patients. Cletus soon befriends Oskar, an aged paper architect who suffers from an endemic neurological disease, aka “french maids,” which is contracted by those exposed to the bioluminescent blue-green algae native to the subsurface ocean. In a series of increasingly-disorienting psychotic episodes, Cletus attempts to ethically navigate the Zoroastrian sex politics of this kinky new world and learn to love more perfectly before going insane, not understanding that love is the madness madder than the rest.

The old lady sits and thinks. People come to her. Life on Earth is over. (Unbeknown to her, Earth cleanup has been going on for 100 years.) She has signed up for a new beginning on Mars. She talks to herself and her nurse about the life she is leaving. Wild imaginings. She knows she will be useful. She wants to be useful. Not hateful. Not mean. 

Our Mars facilitator spills his guts. The project is complete. He is given permission to admit to the sham the Mars project has become. Bring in the candidates. Plug them. Clean them up in every way. Earth goes through spotty but effective cleanup. New and improved Earthlings are returned to do it all again. 

Sister Carrie is a first novel by a writer possessing such an original voice and slashing, surrealistic wit that she is sure to take her place at the forefront of cutting-edge fiction writers. Carrie Meeber leaves her stifling Florida home for Chicago, where she enters the related fields of advertising and prostitution. As an unflappable narrator makes inquiries into her bizarre life, a cartoonish, hyperkinetic, blaring street world envelops the reader.

Depraved characters parade themselves and their crass literary leanings; many keep journals, out of which Carrie is revealed with stylistic pyrotechnics. Fairbanks's scrappy, fantastic, debauched characters reveal themselves as well in hot rapid monologue and dialogue.

There is something of Kathy Acker in Sister Carrie, something of Ronald Firbank, William Burroughs, Mark Leyner perhaps, even the Joyce of Finnegans Wake. (And Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie revamped, accessorized, given riot grrrl attitude.) But it is finally a tour de force from a young woman writer with a voice all her own and a sardonic worldview perfect for the irony-clad nineties.

Bib is a mute, reclusive philosophy student with a compulsive addiction to reading. Hiding from society in an underground apartment, Bib scribbles his bizarre dreams that happen to coincide with the sudden disappearance of those around him. Gradually, Bib is forced out of his underworld to investigate an absent civilization, one where only the poor and social outcasts run free, where the city has reverted to an anarchic state of nature.

Flipping between Bib’s scribbled “dream diaries” and the novelized collapse of the modern world as told in footnotes by The Society of Bibliophiles, Solarium creates an atmosphere that seeks to bend the mind in the search for the body. The world of Solarium depicts a degenerative society, with themes of racial guilt, sexuality, and trauma...

Weeks before Poppy is set to migrate to the human colony on Mars, their mother, Arthemise, takes them for one last voyage to visit the floating homestead on the Henderson Swamp where they were raised. On an Earth where to survive in Louisiana in the summer, one must wear a Dune-like body cooling suit, a much-needed family getaway that couldn't possibly last long enough soon becomes an eternity they can't escape when a geomagnetic solar storm powerful enough to produce widespread voltage collapse happens to coincide with a precipitous tropical system of the sort increasingly common not only along the marshy coasts of North America but uniformly and sporadically across the globe.

This book consists of two novels by David Vardeman written ten years apart. Suddenly, this Summer is a dark mystery; April is the Cruelest Month is a dark farce. The change is not in Vardeman at all. As you read either of the two novels, the Vardeman of the other novel is lurking, and maybe laughing … even scoffing.

Suddenly, this Summer, turns you into an intelligent beetle and sets you free to roam the mind of Roberta Sookey, Iowa librarian, fat woman, woman beset by tragic circumstance, iron lady, proto-feminist, fearless, with the moves of a boxer or ice skater and a mind like a patch of ice she didn’t see coming. Your time inside her head will change nothing outside your door.

April is the Cruelest Month may be the cruelest book. But you will laugh at it, and therein is your complicity. Eddie P’Poole strangled his mother and then shot himself, and there you sit reading and laughing. What kind of monster are you?

David Vardeman has become known as a genius of the short form; the short form, for Vardeman being any length from a few pages to a few hundred, in the case of this book hovering about 100 or so for the first four stories and 20 or so for the last story--Vardemanian humor implicit in the title Zeitgeist being given less shrift than, say, the story Corn, the second longest in the book ("Watering corn was their code, in social situations, for needing to urinate, no delay.") Here's a typical Vardemanian moment, chosen at random: "Sometimes, Irv, you just want the naked man out of your house." Vardeman is genius of the mundane absurd.

Ludivine is the heroine of this postmodern novel. SUPERPOWER(S.) contains a screenplay within a novel. In this novel, Ludivine provides her commentary on the filming of her screenplay, which consists of her life in her own words. The action transports the reader in time and space, popping back and forth from the Nazis in WWII France in 1944 to the Pope in the Vatican, to more recent NYC fashion world and Pakistan. All it takes is a little superpower from Ludivine. 

Ticking all the boxes:

• An eccentric jittery QUEENDOM
• MAJOR MOTION PICTURE with famous actors vying for roles
• SUPERPOWERS
• LOVE 
• France · Vatican City · Scranton, PA · NYC
• SCREENPLAY within a NOVEL
• CAST OF THOUSANDS: Lourdes ·Glastonbury ·Burning Man
• TERRORIST twist
• KIDNAPPING angle
• A DISFIGUREMENT tale: with a magical superpower cure

Our flirtatious nonagenarian protagonist makes a major historical dent in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.