(Review) Jeremy Robert Johnson - "Extinction Journals"

I've been trying to find some of the strangest books I can. In part because I'd like to see what sits on the fringe of a normal readership and in part because I want to see if the writing lives up to the hype of the surreal ideas presented in the synopses of these books. The success rate has been pretty middling. While the ideas are there, the writing isn't, or the converse of the writing being solid, but the idea being very lacking in many ways. Regardless, I still try to give these books a chance since I tend to write in the same kind of vein. I recently received "Extinction Journals" by Jeremy Robert Johnson in the mail as my next experiment in this reading list hypothesis of mine.

The book begins at the near end of World War III. Nuclear fallout covers the country and a single man, Dean, walks the countryside wearing a suit made of cockroaches. The first scene of the book finds us in Dean's perspective as he's choking a dying President of the United States at the base of the Washington Monument in a humanitarian effort of keeping the POTUS from feeling the roach-suit eating away at him. The President, however, is also wearing a suit; one made entirely of Twinkies.

I'll let that sink in for a minute.

Then things turn only slightly more sane. Dean wanders the countryside, wondering if the suit of his own making will allow him to eat since they attacked the President so violently, so hungrily. If the suit dies, does Dean die too? Will a suit of dead roaches still protect him from the radiation of the surrounding atmosphere? He doesn't know, but comes across some water with which to slake their thirst just in case. While doing so, a rainbow-colored, scale-covered cyclops riding a flaming chariot comes down from the sky.

Seriously.

This cyclops is apparently the man-made apparition of the quantum energy made up of the cellular moments when people come to an understanding that they're about to die. The collective final moments of the earth's population have essentially summoned this creature to the planet. After some horribly cliched conversation on topics like "wisdom sharing" through "mutually shared frequencies," Dean and the creature learn a bit about where they're both from and why. When the creature finds out that Dean must be the last living person on Earth, he leaves. This whole section read like bad high school science fiction writing and I was glad when it ended. Though the creature leaves with a final thought that may be the best written line of the book:

"And by the way, Dean, I thought you might find this amusing. For a man so singularly obsessed with death, you are hugely pregnant." 

Dean continues on, walking during the day but allowing the roaches to carry him over distances while he sleeps at night. Weirdly enough, this image makes sense to me. Eventually Dean comes across other dead bodies, all wearing suits of their own:  styrofoam man, concrete block man, a woman wearing "two leather aprons and steel-toed workboots on each of her appendages." Finally, Dean comes across a black man named Wendell wearing a skin suit made of a white man who had better luck than him. Wendell soon expires after Dean gives him CPR. The roach suit consumes Wendell.

Oddly enough, the most interesting parts of the book are the times when Dean has no one to talk to. There is an opportunity that Johnson misses by barely touching on the possibility of Dean's mental acuity post-bombings. If this kind of mentality were more explored, the book wouldn't feel nearly as rushed or feel like it had been written by a teenager with a ton of really interesting images, but not a lot of ways to make those images connect in any real meaningful way. The moment Dean realizes that he can mentally control parts of his roach suit to move in their own specific ways shows a moment of high interest with a lot of possibilities. Instead, this moment moves on into another meeting with a completely nude woman named Mave who wears a suit made entirely of ants.

As it turns out, Mave had been an entymologist before the bombings with her co-worker/lover Terry. Both Terry and Mave were visited by the cyclops alien in burning chariot as well, but Terry disappeared shortly after. Mave, who now believes that the alien has endowed them with special powers of some sort (the ants on her, the roaches on Dean), also believes that Terry will find himself endowed with the species of army ants known to war against the species that Mave currently wears (or is actually the Queen Mother of now). She is afraid that the army ants will overtake Terry's weak will, kill him, then hunt her down and devour her (as is their way of living).

As if the first part of this book hadn't been a complete stretch, now we're getting into some really ridiculous plot-rendering. Granted the book is only 84 pages long, but this is at page 67 where I feel like there's an actual point to the story. And Mave seems to be the most well-written character of the whole piece thus far, which isn't a glowing review on the rest of the characters we very briefly run into along the way.

Mave and Dean fall asleep. While they sleep, Dean's roach suit has moved him far away from Mave, who is now being slowly devoured by Terry's ants (who have obviously found the pair). Dean stops his suit from moving him, returns to the scene, but falls into a trap carved out by Terry's ants. The pregnant roaches covering Dean hatch their eggs and the baby roaches scatter up and over Terry, devouring him and put a halt to Mave's pain (since Terry was controlling the ants eating her).

This is essentially the book. I should've known better when I read that Chuck Palahniuk said of the author and his previous book: "A dazzling writer. Seriously amazing short stories - and I love short stories. Like the best of Tobias Wolff. While I read them, they made time stand still. That's great." After reading this one, I want whatever Palahniuk is smoking because this was, on a story and development level, about the bare minimum you could get away with.

This was one of the worst books I've ever read. I can't imagine that his short stories are much better considering it only took me an hour to read this. Great title, great cover art, but I'd probably use all the pages inside it as toilet paper before I ever recommended this book to anyone else.

(7,732)