Comedy Novels

"Me: That's it! This interview is definitely over! I'm not going to be ambushed by somebody who I happen to know has a few skeletons of his own in his closet, and they are wearing some pretty dirty laundry."

"And Wigfield is small. It's so small that we have to go to the post office for a haircut, and they always lose it."

"Sometimes this place is like Old Salem, hunting for witches because of ignorance. If only they'd reach out and try to understand what we're about, we wouldn't feel compelled to place curses on them."

"Most people think witches are a coven of lesbians dancing naked in the forest celebrating the semen stolen from imprisoned hypnotized males, which they then use to inseminate one another using turkey basters in order to create a legion of demon babies. Well, that's only part of it. We are also active in community outreach programs."

"Dedication: As this book, including this dedication, was written in chronological order, I have, so far only myself to thank. This is assuming I will continue to be involved."

"I worked for the Federal Department of Transportation, painting the center lines on interstates. It was rewarding work, with the added benefit of being unchallenging. But following a heated dispute with my foreman over the meaning of the word sick day, I quit my job shortly after he fired me. But freedom has its price, which I soon found out was money. So, much like a butcher naturally becomes a surgeon, or a boxer becomes a cop, I decided to apply my knowledge of drawing long, white lines on asphalt to drawing much shorter ones with loops and curls on paper. In short, words. I became a writer!"

"What I learned made me angry. What I read made me sleepy."

"I had been on the road for what seemed like weeks but was probably closer to days, more specifically hours."

"To compensate for their skittishness around one another, humans have developed an elaborate system of body language. Folded arms, for instance, may signal that the subject is closed off and wishes for the conversation to end, or that he is an Indian chief. Either way, avoid these people. A woman with her legs splayed wide may be saying "Welcome. How do you do?" or "I am adventurous and open to new ideas." Either way, seek these women out."

"Having never written a book before, I had no way to gauge the time it would take to complete a 50,000 word tome. And then the realisation hit me: I could be at this for days!"

"Udell: There's no need to make a major case out of it. Every small town has its shortcomings. Some small towns have a problem with the kids running off the the big city, other small towns might have worries about a drought affecting the crops, one of ours just happens to be a mindless killing machine who feeds on our fear."

"It's like we're family except we're not related, we didn't grow up together and we don't spend any time with each other. It makes you feel safe to know that if I needed a shovel or some lime, just down the road a bit is a neighbor I could take it from. Just because I don't know a lot of these people's names doesn't mean I won't ask them for things. That's the beauty of this town: neighbors who have things I want."

"I keep a diary. I been keepin' a diary since I was fourteen years old. Writing in a diary is like a muscle, you have to do it every day or you could easily pull it. Even if I don't have anything to say, I write: "Dear diary, I don't have anything to say today, maybe tomorrow." Sometimes I get tired of writing the same thing, so instead I might write, "Dear diary, nothing coming today, I'll see you tomorrow.""

"I begin to search my dresser for clothes until I realize I left them hanging on my body."

"If you get burned by your stove, don't keep touching it, get rid of it!"

"I have a simple philosophy: KOKO! Which stands for Keep On Keepin' On. You know? Keep on living, even if it kills you."

"It turns out it's pretty hard to exercise your right to vote when you're on fire."

"Top of my list is to find out who's killing all these people. I have already narrowed down the list of Mr. or Mrs. Murderer or Murderers. The second thing we need to do is establish a profile of the perp. Now, my investigation has show that the victims were killed by a blunt trauma to the back of the head or stabbing or shooting or poisoning or burning or... did I say shooting? This is often followed by dismemberment. Or preceded. It's really hard to tell after a while. But clearly this is a person who is a local and familiar to everyone or a stranger just passing through whose movements remain a mystery."

"I came to this town to represent the lead dispersal plant. The government wanted to close it because they said it was retarding the employees. So they closed it. I got a court order that allowed me to stay at the plant so I could disprove firsthand the effects of the plant. I like watches; they're shiny."

"I'm the great American success story. One day you're livin' out of your car, the next day you're livin' out of your car, and you're the mayor of a town. I practically run this place, and I'm not even fully unpacked."

"And of course there're those stories about the Wigfield Maniac, how thre's a madman in town, but I don't believe it's real. I think somebody is killing folks just to scare people."

"Animals think they are so superior to us. They pretend to act so innocent, all furry and frolicsome, but when we're not looking, they mock us. As I cut away the skin from a deer's skull, I always think, "Who's laughing now?" Usually it's me."

"Most animals are just waiting for their chance to take a swipe at a human. It's in their nature. They're animals. That's why we call them that. They don't have souls. They don't have nothing to fear in the afterlife. They have nothing to lose!"

"A hummingbird would gladly peck your eyes out. It would amuse it. It would hover above your eye socket sucking out your eye juice like nectar and throw it back up to its waiting hungry children! I'm not making this stuff up, I'm imagining it."

"Two things became clear after speaking to Lenare Degroat: One, steer clear of Lenare Degroat."

"I've spent every one of my forty-eight years right here in Wigfield, except for the times I've been incarcerated or living elsewhere."

"We have a strong sense of tradition here in Wigfield. We're one of the only towns that still celebrates V-J Day. For you young 'uns, that stands for victory over the Japanese! It's a joyous celebration. It's a time when the town comes together and remembers how many gave away their lives to nobly advance the cause of liberty, but mostly it's a good way to get together to remember how much we hate the Japanese. We hate Koreans, too!"

"More than ever the theater is the lifeblood of a community, but it's more than that. It's all the fluids, blood, semen, urine, and saliva. If I don't leave that combination of liquids onstage after a performance, then I know I have dropped the ball and let my audience down."

"A terminal learning comes to me: that for all the sirens, game-show buzzers, and drum-rolls of life, it is the nature of men to die quietly. I mean, what kind of life was that? – a bunch of movies, and people talking about movies, and shows about people talking about movies. Still, I guess I asked for it. By being negative, destructive. I remember once calling my daddy to collect me from a place, but was sad when he came because I'd since grown to love the place. Death takes me like that."

"I take off my shirt. My skin is mostly healed now, from my art project. Tattooed in big blue letters across my chest are the words 'Me ves y sufres'—'See me and suffer.'"

"I watch Lally climb out of the car. Bless the motherfucker to hell. Bless his bones smashed and stuffed through the ligaments of his puking fucked eyes, bless his mouth to suck me off, take my bile so it kills him dead to a place where he stays conscious and fucken broken and cold, shivering fucken worms and slime from organs that pop and fucken waste as I laugh."

"One learning, though: my big flaw is fear. In a world where you're supposed to be a psycho, I just didn't yell loud enough to get ahead. I was too darn embarrassed to play God."

"'Blind, dumb shit,' he spits, his breath like hot sandpaper in my ear. 'Where's this God you talk about? You think a caring intelligence would wipe out babies from hunger, watch decent folk scream and burn and bleed every second of the day and night? That ain't no God. Just fuckin people. You stuck with the rest of us in this snake-pit of human wants, wants frustrated and calcified into needs, achin and raw.'"

"As I digest things, the regular Sunday quiet falls over the Row. You hear some papers rustle. Then a con calls out, softly."

"Lally's face is a mask I fucken adore, suspended in time forever as slugs whistle and pierce the evening sky. He dances mid-air as chunks of his body pelt down like rain, before the bulk of him thuds twitching to the ground."

"She said Mom closed up the house one day, turned the oven on full, and sat by its open door. Apparently, it's still a Cry For Help, even though our oven's electric."

"Alright I stand accused of just about every murder in Texas between the time I left home and when they hauled my ass back. With my face all over the media, folks started seeing me everywhere, I guess. Recall, they call it. Watch out for that sucker. And I'm still accused of the tragedy. Everybody just forgot about Jesus. Everybody except me."

"School never teaches you about this mangled human slime, it slays me. You spend all your time learning the capital of Surinam while these retards carve their initials in your back."

"The official ushers me to a desk, and sits behind it, all straight-backed, like he's the president of South America or something, like the borderline is the crack of his fucken ass."

"A learning: deep shit sweetens your plans like crazy."

"A learning grows in me like a tumor. It's about the way different needy people find the quickest route to get some attention in their miserable fucken lives. The fucken oozing nakedness, the despair of being such a vulnerable egg-sac of a critter, like, a so-called human being, just sickens me sometimes, especially right now. The Human Condition, Mom calls it. Watch out for that fucker."

"Fate always pays attention to what you think, then slams it up your fucken ass."

"An American family sweeps past me into the elevator, dressed like Tommy Hilfiger on a golfing convention; it's a mama with a tense ole man, and the traditional two kids—a good one and a bad one. Type of folk who get lighthearted over dinner-music, and start talking about their feelings, to show how liberated they are. Your fucken cutlery drawer on parade."

"'And we're not just talking executions here—were talking the ultimate reality TV, where the public can monitor, via cable or internet, prisoners' whole lives on death row. They can live amongst them, so to speak, and make up their own minds about a convict's worthiness for punishment. Then each week, viewers across the globe can cast a vote to decide which prisoner is executed next. It's humanity in action—the next logical step toward true democracy.'"

"I stand insulated from my world by the buzzing tequila-ozone of what I just did. Lies scatter around me like ants."

"Nah, my slime's so thick, it ain't worth coming clean at all. Take good note; Fate actually makes it harder to admit slime, the farther in you get. What kind of system is that? If I was president of the Slime Committee, I'd make it easier to come clean about shit. If coming clean is what you're supposed to do, then it should be made more fucken accessible, I say. I guess the shiver that really comes over me is that I just handed everybody the final nail for my cross. All they needed, on top of everything, was a credible lie. You can just see my ole lady on TV when they break the news, don't tell me you can't. 'Well but I even stayed up to pack his sandwiches...'"

"There's the learning, O Partner: that you're cursed when you realize true things, because then you can't act with the full confidence of dumbness anymore."

"I hear Taylor's song through the 'Tss, tss, tss' of a guy's earphones, a couple of rows up. 'Better Man' is the tune, by Pearl Jam. I don't even know the words to the song, but you can bet I'll spend the next eighty years in hell making every line fit my situation. Even if it ends up being about fucken groundhogs in space or something."

"You can only really be yourself when you have nothing left to lose, see? That's a learning I made. It may sound dumb, but it ain't easy when your dreams roll up. Take note, you can feel jerksville lurking in back. And as we know, just by thinking it, you suffer it worse. The learning: potential assholeness when a dream comes true is relative to the amount of time you spent working up the dream. A=DT^2. It means I could even fucken puke."

"She gets that fabulous edge that girls get to their voices, the edge that spells oncoming Tantrum From the Bowels of Hell, that says, 'I'll scratch the heavens down around you and suck the fucken air from your lungs and spit you to fucken hell and you know it.'"