Over the last year I’ve been purchasing, reading, and reviewing books by small presses exclusively. I submit to small presses, so I should support them. I’ve been especially taken with books from Expat Press. Last August I read and reviewed the short story collection, L, by Theresa Smith. You can read that review (and learn more about Expat): here
Just recently, I finished another release from Expat… the novel, This hasn’t been a very magical journey so far by the author, Homeless.
Given the title of the book, the author’s pen name, and book’s cover… well, I didn’t know what I was getting into.
Turns out, I was getting into one of the most unique and engaging books that I’ve read in a long time. Part Alice in Wonderland, part magic mushroom trip, and part deep exploration of loss and how to carry on in the face of the crippling mourning that often accompanies loss… this book is damn near perfect in what it sets out to do.
Hank Williams (just a broken man, not the singer) goes on a road trip through a bizarre, gray landscape. His driver (and ultimately his quirky Virgil) is a humanoid cat named Sid. They aren’t quite sure where they’re going, but Hank Williams knows he needs to go, and so he rides shotgun in Sid’s filthy van complete with large (and used) litter boxes in the back.
Even though my early description makes the novel sound either surreal or depressing, it’s actually filled with hilarious moments, too. For instance, when Hank Williams suggests that instead of stopping to pee, he could just use one of Sid’s litter boxes, Sid points to a sword in the back of the van… letting Hank Williams know that if he ever touches the litter boxes, Sid will decapitate him.
There’s no doubt that he’s being deadly serious.
At another point, after they clear out a motel room of its soaps, shampoos, and towels, Sid instructs Hank Williams to not forget the bible. Later, while Sid is reading and driving, we get this:
“‘Jesus…’ Sid says with his big yellow eyes staring at the bible he holds open over the steering wheel. ‘They sure do talk a lot about God in this book.’”
I don’t know… when I ran across that I laughed out loud, and not for the last time while reading the book.
The book moves back and forth between Sid and Hank Williams’ crazy (and wholly entertaining) adventures and Hank William’s memories of Patsy Cline (just a broken woman, not the singer). Hank Williams and Patsy Cline met in a psych unit and soon discover that each is the other’s “umbrella”… a cover against the hard realities of life.
The descriptions of their falling in love are beautiful. And, I must say, even though traditional writing advice says “avoid similes” … well, this book alone is worth your purchase just to read Homeless’ sublime similes.
At one point, Hank Williams tries to explain to Sid how when he still had her, Patsy Cline was a light in his dark life. Sid listens listlessly to Hank Williams:
“‘Words… So many words in my head right now. And the words are all gray. I have gray words inside my head and I don’t know how to make them colorful again. They used to be colorful. Well maybe not colorful, but at the very least they were different colors. There was a short amount of time when they became colorful. It was when I fell in love with a witch. She didn’t wear a black, pointy hat on her head or anything but her words did. Her words wore black, pointy hats and flew outta her mouth on broomsticks. And I’d never met anyone before whose words wore black, pointy hats and flew outta their mouth on broomsticks. But it was like, ‘Where have you been? I’ve been waiting for you.’ It was the way her words moved me, I think. They didn’t try to but they just did. Which is like the opposite of a spell. In a spell you speak specific words in order to make someone do something or make someone feel a specific way and which they also have no control over. Which is impressive in its own way. But that’s how the entire world speaks – in spells. Everyone trying to control one another with carefully arranged words to make them feel the specific ways that the speaker wants them to feel. But she spoke from someplace different than everyone else.’”
So yes, you have this crazy road trip where a cat, in a van named Nancy, drives a broken man into a gray landscape and encounters humanoid owls, gophers, and pigs -- never stopping for too long because they are also being pursued by a black abyss that consumes the landscape behind them.
But then you also have passages like the one I quoted above.
Or like this next passage, when Hank Williams gets the chance to speak with Patsy Cline one last time:
“‘There’s no such thing as taking care of people, darling. There’s only loving them unconditionally. And then there’s how gracefully you deal with the aftermath and consequences of loving them unconditionally. And there always will be the aftermath and consequences of some kind. Because if there isn’t you didn’t love them unconditionally. Do you understand?”
Now Hank Williams nods softly.
As he does, she looks as if she’s nodding too, though her head is completely motionless.
‘How come you know that but don’t know anything else?” Hank Williams asks.
‘Because you just realized it,’ she says, ‘And you want to know if I really loved you. And you want to know why I left. But you can’t know those things. Ever.’
I highly recommend this book. You’ll love the road trip Sid and Hank Williams take… and you’ll have fun wondering what the adventure really symbolizes. Is it a journey into Hank Williams’ head? Into his sorrow? In some way do the key points in the adventure represent key points in Hank Williams’ actual life?
Trust me on this… you’ll love Sid too.
One of the things I really enjoyed about this book was the short chapters. Over a year into this pandemic, I’ve found that my ability to concentrate on fiction is greatly hampered. The short chapters (1 to 4 pages) in this book allowed me to live in it briefly, purposefully, and keep moving forward with my reading… until today when I just couldn’t stop reading the last 50 pages. I had to know how this crazy thing ended.
So, I’m saying buy this book. This book is the reason small presses exist. I would imagine Homeless would have had a difficult time landing an agent for this book… (and that says more about the capitalistic nature of agents and Big Five publishers than it does about the quality of this book). Agents want to know, “Is there a ready-made audience for this book that will result in sales, sales, sales.”
Expat Press seems to say, “Fuck a ready-made audience. We’ll make an audience, goddamn it. A book like this will find an audience.”
And that’s what I hope this review does. That’s why I write these reviews… to put a spotlight on really good books out from small presses. But, the spotlight isn’t for the spotlight’s sake… it’s hoping that the review will result in sales. Not in some capitalistic sales, sales, sales frame of mind, but instead in a survival frame of mind. Small presses need sales too in order to survive… in order to have the resources to take those publishing risks on incredible books like This hasn’t been a very magical journey so far.
You’ll find the purchasing link for this book below. You’ll see that Expat Press doesn’t use Amazon. You have to buy directly from their site. And that’s good. It means more money for the press and more money for the author.
Amazon is a leach… an abyss feeding off the hard work of authors and publishers, taking an unfair cut only because they’ve nearly monopolized the online book purchasing world.
It doesn’t have to be that way. You could do your part in fighting the good fight against Amazon’s stranglehold on the book purchasing world.
You could do that by simply clicking this link and buying this book: here
Jeff Vande Zande is an English professor at Delta College in Michigan. His latest collection, The Neighborhood Division: Stories, is now out through Whistling Shade Press and available: here.
