PUBLICATION INFORMATION

August 2010 • Atlatl Press
135 pages • Trade Paperback • 6" x 9"
$12.95 • ISBN 978-0-9826281-2-6

PRESS KIT FILES

Press Release • Excerpt • Contents

CONTACT

Publisher: Gregory Seymour
Author: D. Harlan Wilson

COVER

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AUTHOR PHOTO

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BOOK DESCRIPTION

D. Harlan Wilson returns with another ferociously mindbending collection of short fiction. Masked in absurdity, these stories reveal the horrifying and hilarious faces of everyday life. Wilson tells of egg raids, hog rippers, monk spitters, fathers who take their children to pet stores to buy them whales, sociopaths who threaten to clothesline eternity, and the simple act of the story itself becoming a means of repetitive, endless torture. Put on your goat head, hop in your hovercraft, and take a ride with a juggernaut of modern imaginative fiction.

PRAISE

"Funny, experimental, troubling, this brilliant collection of short stories proves conclusively that D. Harlan Wilson is a maverick author of genius. Some of his stories remind me of Barthelme: they are playful, rhythmic and utilise form in hilariously unexpected ways, and they are eminently quotable ("Conflict is an illusion without which apes and begonias would shrivel in the wind."). Other tales resemble early Calvino: absurd and light but also pithy and profound. But aside from these comparisons, Wilson is clearly a writer with his own distinctive voice. For years I have grumbled that there is too little quality fiction of this type. Wilson has persuaded me to shut my goddamn mouth." Rhys Hughes, author of The Smell of Telescopes and A New Universal History of Infamy

"D. Harlan Wilson doesn't just gaze into the abyss. He dives headlong into it, pulling us with him and laughing maniacally all the way down." Tim Waggoner, author of Cross Country and Nekropolis

"D. Harlan Wilson is a surgical practitioner of the surreal and absurd." The Black Boot

"At times troubling, often brilliant, always unpredictable, D. Harlan Wilson’s short story collection, They Had Goat Heads, is an unmitigated marriage of discomfort and delight. The nineteen short stories bound together in this, Wilson’s latest collection, combine elements of humor and horror with hints of madness and a touch of brazen creative brilliance rarely seen in modern stream of consciousness stories. Each tale is unpleasantly absurd, from 'Monster Truck,' in which a man welds wheels to his knees and elbows in order to fulfill a dream of becoming a monster truck, to 'The Arrest,' in which seven men attempt to arrest one another. Dark and decidedly disturbing, the stories in They Had Goat Heads succeed where similarly styled stories have predominantly failed. Wilson masks meaning behind the macabre flow of thoughts and words that, combined, comprise his unique vision." Horrorbound Magazine

"Here we have a very gifted wordsmith, one who puts as much emphasis on tempo as he does lucidity, and while, oftentimes, Wilson’s stories (forty in all, many of which aren’t much longer than a few paragraphs, some as short as a single line) veer off into the absurd, they never failed to register some sort of response in me. It’s like the written equivalent of an abstract painting, where almost everything is left open to interpretation. It goes against everything I’ve ever learned as a writer, but that’s precisely the point. This is bold, experimental stuff ... schizophrenic sci-fi wrapped in nightmare logic." Horrorview

"They Had Goat Heads is best swallowed whole. A set of individual stories, vignettes, flash fictions and single-sentence narratives, it is by turns menacing, hilarious, eccentric, surreal and downright incomprehensible ... It is almost an epic poem of the absurd ... Gloriously anarchic, satisfyingly different and immensely rewarding." The Future Fire

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

D. Harlan Wilson is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, literary critic, screenwriter, and associate professor of English at Wright State University-Lake Campus. Hundreds of his stories and essays have appeared in magazines, journals and anthologies throughout the world in several languages, and he is the editor-in-chief of The Dream People, a journal of irreal texts. His first novel, Dr. Identity, or, Farewell to Plaqudemia, received the Wonderland Book Award for best novel of 2007, and his short film The Cocktail Party, directed by Brandon Duncan, won multiple awards in 2007 at film festivals and conferences, including an official selection at Comic-Con. For more information, visit www.dharlanwilson.com or contact Wilson's publicist Stanley Ashenbach.