Last Week's Apocalypse

[July 19th, 2006] I went to college with a guy, Lee, who suffered from a serious social disability. A convergence of mild autism with a lifetime subscription to Rolling Stone made his company intolerable to most of our classmates.

I ate lunch with Lee, when our schedules converged, in the cafeteria. Our conversations always followed the same pattern: Lee would ask a provocative question ("Did Oswald really shoot Kennedy? Do you believe in extraterrestrial life?"), I would answer as sincerely as I could, and he would launch into a long, unrelated sermon on pop-culture minutiae. Once, he recounted the complete history of the Ramones. Another day it was the social subtext of Ed Wood's films. His lectures were all delivered in the same ponderous monotone.

Reading Portland author and anarchist Douglas Lain's new collection of speculative short fiction, Last Week's Apocalypse (Night Shade, 256 pages, $14.95), is like eating a nine-course meal with Lee. Despite your best intentions, you nod off before the soup arrives, and the food turns bitter on your tongue.

Each of these 14 stories has an interesting premise: a holographic Jesus in a briefcase, a composer inspired by a giant bee, a world stuck in 1984. Sounds decently weird, right?

But then, a few paragraphs in, each story dissolves into a frivolous and tiresome pastiche of pop-culture references: One character can't decide whether he "feel[s] more like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate or Ric Ocasek in the Cars' video for the song 'Magic.'" Another goes on for pages about Mister Rogers. It's exhausting and distracts the reader from whatever redeeming point the story might have.

The book's back cover describes Lain as "Gore Vidal meets Philip K. Dick." The Vidal comparison is baffling, but invoking the holy name of Dick has become de rigueur among the current generation of sci-fi writers.

In Lain's case, a comparison to the master sci-fi writer isn't entirely inappropriate, but his stories are reminiscent of Dick at his worst: a name-dropping hack infatuated with the novelty of his own work. Dick's deservedly lesser-known early short stories are peppered with cameos by other genre authors, like particularly pretentious fan fiction.

Lain is trying his damndest to write A Scanner Darkly—a successful mix of fantasy and social commentary—but he's failing. His writing loses the sense of terrible wonder at the human condition that graces the best of Dick's novels in a dull wash of tedious nostalgia and bitter resentment of the status quo.

It doesn't help that Lain is incapable of writing a contiguous scene longer than a few paragraphs. Fragmentary writing is all well and good when it seems effortless. In Lain's case, it's just another sign of artistic immaturity. It's a shame, because there are a few good ideas in this manure pile.