Brilliant, funny, profane
Everything Is Awful and You’re a Terrible Person Daniel Zomparelli Arsenal Pulp Press
Brilliant is not too strong a word to describe Everything Is Awful and You’re a Terrible Person. Funny, wicked, moving, profane and sad come to mind too. This is a bomb of a book wrapped up in 32 short stories, some of them very short. It feels like an explosion of fresh air.
Derek, Jared, Ryan, Darryl, Steve, Erik, Anthony, Kevin, Jacob, Danny. All these men have one thing in common. They’re gay. Same goes for Harley Queen, What’s His Face, Chill and laid back dude, Muscguy, Tropical Bill Murray, Winnie the Pooh, Porn Beard. These are “Grindr” names or personas, or could be.
Grindr is a real-world “gay dating app & social network.” The characters in this book are intensely interested in relationships with other men. The intensity is at the level of the relationship each has with his phone. Each character lives by social media and dies by it too. There’s a lot of profile trolling and date arranging. Selfies. Emojis. Hashtags. Blocking and being blocked. The pace is frenetic.
One character is a ghost. You wouldn’t think a story like Ghosts Can Be Boyfriends Too could possibly work, but it does. It’s weird, but beautifully realized.
Some characters appear in more than one story and all of these stories are linked in some way. Some of these men have dated one another, some are exes of others. Most of them are young. All of them are looking for something. They’re looking for what most people look for, happiness and love. It’s an awful struggle.
There’s a lot of anxiety and unease lurking in these lives. In Tongue Out Smiley Face, the unnamed protagonist says, “I called an ex-boyfriend to come over. This is what I did after my breakup. I would call my previous boyfriend, have sex with them, then beg them to leave immediately afterward. Daisy chaining. That’s what my therapist called it.”
In Sex Date, the therapist tells the client, “body dysmorphia is normal and common among gay men.” Body dysmorphia is when you get unhealthily obsessive about your appearance. As an example, Nice Shorts, Bro is an excruciating look into Kevin’s painful self-consciousness and over-concern about his image, with lactose intolerance and a little bondage thrown in. You feel for this young man’s tortured soul, but the story kills. It’s hysterical.
Anthony in Fake Boyfriend works for Fakeboyfriend.com. “Would you like a boyfriend who texts you all the time, and ONLY has time for you?” But that’s all the service is. Actually dating anyone will get you fired right away, but Anthony can’t hold back from meeting the guys who contact him.
These are flawed characters, their humanity front and centre. But it’s not all bad. You can have terrible relationships with your parents too. In The License, the father says to his adult son, “You gotta go to church, that’s where you find a girlfriend. You never have a girlfriend, you’re getting too old, and no girls. You can’t be alone.” He doesn’t get it, and wouldn’t accept it if he ever did.
Everything Is Awful is Zomparelli’s first work of fiction. This may be gay literature, but it’s more than that. It’s a literary event. It’s mainstream, avant-garde and delivers on that hard-to-describe feeling you get discovering something new and important.