Field ReportingRennie Shannach, an embattled government worker and struggling writer, relieves the boredom of an office presentation by writing a soft-porn episode on his agency’s mainframe computer about Captain Nookie, a pulp fiction anti-hero he’d conceived during his college days. His supervisors discover the piece and bring it to Vanna Morph, their agency’s sexually-charged commissioner, hoping she’ll terminate him. Instead, Morph finds Shannach’s fictional creation intriguing and wants to learn more about the masked man. Shannach’s subsequent field reports on his rental subsidy inspections combine with the sexually-charged world of human services to create a battleground of farce and frenzy so encompassing that he even battles with the author over his role as narrator while fantasy and reality become not only interchangeable, but indelibly linked. |
Relic’s ReunionsEdsel Relic, a performance poet who has just been diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome, receives an invitation from his unrequited highschool love to attend his 25th school class reunion. In his internal debate whether to go, he reassesses his life as a teenage outsider seeking refuge in the jazz life through a series of hallucinatory episodes that include cameo appearances by Walter Cronkite. “Vernon Frazer’s Relic’s Reunions is a wonderful blend of two sorts of books. It is a great novel about entering your forties and facing the test of the high school reunion. It is also a great subterranean novel, a worthy heir to Jack Kerouac and Chandler Brossard. It talks about successes and failures in a free-flowing style that draws from jazz, poetry, movies—and it does all this in a funny bittersweet voice that is a great comment on the late nineties. . .The best of what Beat might have become is becoming now through Vernon Frazer.” —Don Webb, author A Spell for the Fulfillment of Desire |
Stay Tuned to This ChannelA finalist in the 1996 Black Ice/FC2 Fiction Contest, Stay Tuned to this Channel explores the terra incognita of cutting-edge fiction in thirteen stories as accessible as they are adventurous. Frazer’s narrative techniques create a mixed-media surrounding of the senses through which a wit whips from antic to acidic at the turn of a phrase. In the course of challenging conventional assump-tions about what constitutes reality, Stay Tuned to This Channel seeks—and finds—a heightened reality whose distortions present a pointed reflection of daily life in America’s commodity-driven culture. “…like Bartheleme or Chris Mazza, with a strong sense of fun, of what to do with text… The best of what Beat might have become is becoming now through Vernon Frazer.” —Don Webb, author Uncle Ovid’s Exercise Book |
Commercial FictionAn author writing Commercial Fiction while working for a government agency awakens in such a disoriented state that he can’t tell if he’s writing at work or at home. His attempts to regain his sense of reality whirl him through a wonderland of hilariously conceived characters and situations. Commercial Fiction’s sup-porting cast includes sex-addicted government officials, silicon-en-hanced TV stars, gun-running charity workers, soap opera actors and other unforgettable characters driven to desperate acts in their pursuit of power, money, and love. “It’s a great book, a book I’ve always felt someone should write, thinking maybe I would do it at some point–and now I don’t have to. —Stephen-Paul Martin, author Instead of Confusion |
