Mini-book review: Lonely Christopher's "The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse"

In 2003, the novelist Dennis Cooper launched his Little House on the Bowery series in connection with Akashic Books. Releasing around two books a year, this line of fiction books focuses mainly on younger North American writers who, according to an introduction for the series written by Dennis himself, "believe that fiction can be as entertaining, challenging, revelatory, and, in a word, important as any other medium. I hope Little House on the Bowery will be a reliable source for readers who want literature to be an adventure on the levels of content and style. I also want it to be an oasis for people who have come to see contemporary literature as a spotty, conservative medium." Over the years Little House on the Bowery has released a number of innovative and captivating books, including 2007's short fiction anthology Userlands (confession: a story of mine appeared in this book so naturally I'm biased) and, more recently, Mark Gluth's sublime novella The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis. Early this year they released their two newest titles, a reissue of Matthew Stokoe's cult transgressive novel Cows and Lonely Christopher's The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, a collection of nine short stories that I have just recently completed reading and will now briefly review.

This is certainly a most curious collection, and I'm having trouble classifying it. Many of the stories (which end on ambigious notes) feature characters with unusual names, such as Dumb, Vowel Shift, Burning Church, Normal Chapter, and Timmy Victim. And the writing style is very unusual. For example, the first story, "That Which," is narrated by a boy who suffered from a debilitating head injury and is thus written in a very disjointed manner. Equally bizarre is the subject matter: the fourth story, "Milk" (which is also the shortest story in the collection at a mere 4 pages) revolves around the murder of a horse in a kitchen. The better stories, in my opinion, are the longer ones that focus more on characterization, such as "Burning Church," (which deals with a week in the life of a school teacher named Burning Church), and "Game Belly," an atmospheric piece which takes place in an empty city late at night and which revolves around a number of vacuous characters going about their nocturnal activity (though I wonder what exactly a "game belly" is). By far the best story is "Nobody Understands Thorny When," which at 34 pages is the longest story of the book. It's about the relationship between an odd boy (named Thorny When) and his kidnapper (Normal Chapter), and their most strange love affair, and how Thorny's life changes when he's "saved" from his captor after four years.

Not all of the stories worked for me though. I had no idea what "The Pokemon Movie" was supposed to be about (perhaps because I'm not all that familiar with the Pokemon phenomenon in general), though if I had to hazard a guess I'd say it's about the loss of childhood innocence. And the last story, "White Dog," which is about a seven foot tall lesbian who wanders in a dream-like daze through a supermarket, goes on for way too long, with many tedious and rambling paragraphs (the narrator spends 4 pages debating whether to buy mascara or not).

For the most part, however, I found the stories to be well-written, entertaining and humorous. I can only wonder what Christopher's influences are... some of the stories have a sort of David Lynch vibe ("Burning Church" even features a hallway light that flickers constantly). He certainly has an impressive vocabulary: some words that really stood out were "videlicet," "pulchritude," and "contrastively." One thing is certain: it will be interesting to see in what direction he takes his fiction next.

Finally, like many of the other books released by Little House on the Bowery, this one also features a typically awesome cover by Joel Westendorf.