Shel Silverstein, Edward Gorey, Maurice Sendak...Nefarious Twit.
Madness. Murder. Children’s literature. A psychedelic odyssey of vengeance and family.
Thanks for reading about my project.
My debut novel Nefarious Twit is a 300-page book featuring 14 of my own full-page illustrations. I’ve been working on this novel for the last 6 years and I am happy to say that it’s finally ready to share.
Nefarious Twit reads sort of like a psychotic, adult Lemony Snicket. It’s a really dark, drugged out, surreal road trip story about two brothers who are severely damaged people. Some parts are bleakly funny, some are beautifully sad and a lot are seriously weird. The main character is a young man named Rick Lime, who is looking for his father, a legendary children’s book author with the pen name Nefarious Twit. The Shel Silversteinesque Nefarious Twit disappeared from the public eye 22 years ago and abandoned Rick and Rick’s mother at the height of his fame after releasing one final controversial children’s book. Rick Lime wants to find his father so that he can murder him.
Cheery stuff, I know.
The book begins after Rick’s mother has committed suicide and Rick convinces his-half brother Lou that her death is Rick’s father’s fault; that his father leaving their mother and cutting off all contact led to this. The bulk of the novel consists of the two brothers, both addicted to a fictional drug called Vitrillum, which was once legal and prescribed to them when they were kids as an alternative to Ritalin, and their quest to find Twit.
As the Lime brothers leave their hometown of Tucson, Arizona and set out for misguided vengeance, their drug-soaked journey begins to resemble one of Twit’s children stories more and more. Reality and Twit’s stories seem to converge as the brothers follow the path of the dark ladder, the ominous symbol from Twit’s most popular books, which seems to be leading them right to the author.
All the while Lou is becoming more and more violent and unpredictable the closer they get to confronting Twit. Eventually Rick is faced with the hard choice of abandoning his loyal but dangerous brother in order to get revenge on his father or giving up this grand plan and sticking by the only family he has left.
The book is a bent sort of odyssey through the darker parts of North America. There are stop offs involving blissful, stoned children on psychotropic drugs administered by their mothers, erectile dysfunction, and the prevailing myth of the Wandering Jew.
I feel my novel isn’t simply bizarro or weird for weird’s sake. The novel is crazy, there is satire, and there is violence but there is also heart. Not sentimental drivel, but a real story about fathers and sons, underneath all the insanity.
