Born out of the cultural flamboyance and anxiety of the 1980s, They Live (1988) is a hallmark of John Carpenter's singular canon, combining the aesthetics of multiple genres and leveling an attack against the politics of Reaganism and the Cold War. The decision to cast the professional wrestler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper as his protagonist gave Carpenter the additional means to comment on the hypermasculine attitudes and codes indicative of the era. This study traces the development of They Live from its comic book roots to its legacy as a cult masterpiece while evaluating the film in light of the paranoid/postmodern theory that matured in the decidedly "Big 80s." Directed by a reluctant auteur, the film is examined as a complex work of metafiction that calls attention to the nature of cinematic production and reception as well as the dynamics of the cult landscape.

They Live (Cultographies)

Humor & Entertainment

Wilson, D. Harlan

Movies

Wallflower Press

J. G. Ballard (Modern Masters of Science Fiction)

Prophetic short stories and apocalyptic novels like The Crystal World made J. G. Ballard a foundational figure in the British New Wave. Rejecting the science fiction of rockets and aliens, he explored an inner space of humanity informed by psychiatry and biology and shaped by Surrealism. Later in his career, Ballard's combustible plots and violent imagery spurred controversy--even legal action--while his autobiographical 1984 war novel Empire of the Sun brought him fame. D. Harlan Wilson offers the first career-spanning analysis of an author who helped steer SF in new, if startling, directions. Here was a writer committed to moral ambiguity, one who drowned the world and erected a London high-rise doomed to descend into savagery--and coolly picked apart the characters trapped within each story. Wilson also examines Ballard's methods, his influence on cyberpunk, and the ways his fiction operates within the sphere of our larger culture and within SF itself.

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

University of Illinois Press

Prophetic short stories and apocalyptic novels like The Crystal World made J. G. Ballard a foundational figure in the British New Wave. Rejecting the science fiction of rockets and aliens, he explored an inner space of humanity informed by psychiatry and biology and shaped by Surrealism. Later in his career, Ballard's combustible plots and violent imagery spurred controversy--even legal action--while his autobiographical 1984 war novel Empire of the Sun brought him fame. D. Harlan Wilson offers the first career-spanning analysis of an author who helped steer SF in new, if startling, directions. Here was a writer committed to moral ambiguity, one who drowned the world and erected a London high-rise doomed to descend into savagery--and coolly picked apart the characters trapped within each story. Wilson also examines Ballard's methods, his influence on cyberpunk, and the ways his fiction operates within the sphere of our larger culture and within SF itself.

The Kafka Effekt is D. Harlan Wilson's debut book, a collection of forty-four short stories loosely written in the vein of Franz Kafka, with more than a pinch of William S. Burroughs sprinkled on top. A manic depressive has a baby's bottom grafted onto his face; a hermaphrodite impregnates itself and gives birth to twins; a gaggle of professors find themselves trapped in a port-a-john and struggle to liberate their minds from the prison of reason-these are just a few of the precarious situations that the characters herein are forced to confront. The Kafka Effekt is a postmodern scream. Absurd, intelligent, funny and scatological, Wilson turns reality inside out and exposes it as a grotesque, nightmarish machine that is always-already processing the human subject, who struggles to break free from the machine, but who at the same time revels in its subjugation.

The Kafka Effekt

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

Eraserhead Press

In this collection of stories, D. Harlan Wilson deconditions the boundaries of reality with the same offbeat methodology that energized his first book The Kafka Effekt. Stranger on the Loose is an absurdist account of urban and suburban social dynamics, and of the effects that contemporary image-culture has on the (in)human condition. These stories operate on a plane of existence that resists, and in many cases breaks, the laws of causality. Parrots teach college courses. Flaneurs impersonate bowling pins. Bodybuilders sneak into people's homes and strike poses at their leisure. Passive-aggressive glaciers and miniature elephant-humans antagonize the seedy streets of Suburbia. Apes disguised as scientists reincarnate Walt Disney, who discovers that he is a Chinese box full of disguised Walt Disneys . . . Wilson's imagination is a rare specimen. The acorns of his fiction are planted in the soil of normalcy, but what grows out of that soil is a dark, witty, otherworldly jungle.

Stranger on the Loose

Necrotic Tissue, Issue #13

McCan, John P.

Genre Fiction

Stygian Publications

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.

They Had Goat Heads

Humor & Satire

Atlatl Press

In Diegeses, acclaimed novelist and critic D. Harlan Wilson channels the "schiz-flows" of Ballard, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Burroughs, and Deleuze and Guattari in two interconnected novelettes. "The Bureau of Me" and "The Idaho Reality" follow a man who goes only by the name of Curd into the nightmarish prism of his own ego. In an ominous, darkly surreal near-future, Curd is visited by a group of mysterious strangers who claim to be representatives of the Bureau of Me. As he struggles to negotiate their weird aggression, he sinks deeper and deeper into alcoholism. The Bureau of Me suspects he is a becoming-god, but deification has its price. Inevitably he finds himself alone in a postapocalyptic wasteland, the last man, zombified physically and mentally. "The Idaho Reality" sees Curd rebooted from end-of-the-world subhuman to futuristic soap opera star. In a series of schizophrenic vignettes that mirror the condition of his psyche, he is turned inside-out. No longer the weak, insecure drunk he was in "The Bureau of Me," now he is an omnipotent television icon, although his penchant for hypermasculine assholery has shifted into high gear, rendering him more clown than becoming-god, degraded by the spectacle of simulation. Literary and grotesque, humorous and dismal, theoretical and streetwise, Diegeses is and avant-pop masterpiece that entertains as much as it enlightens, unstringing the complexities of the mind while tying them into new and undiscovered knots.

Diegeses

Literary

Anti-Oedipus Press

A nameless professor's methods of teaching and scholarship become toxic; he is sent back to college to redo his Ph.D. and redeem his authority. This is only the beginning of terror. Life at the University isn't what it used to be. Confronted by folly, redundancy and pornography at every turn, the professor must struggle to follow the rules and be a good student even as he terrorizes the roommates, faculty, staff and administrators that threaten to undermine his rancorous will to power. Narrated in D. Harlan Wilson's token "Hörnblower" prose, PRIMORDIAL: AN ABSTRACTION is an exercise in absurdity that rakes academia over the coals while plumbing the obscurities of existence and identity.

Primordial: An Abstraction

Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-1911) came to prominence as one of history's most famous madmen in the wake of Sigmund Freud's "Psychoanalytic Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia" (1911). Freud's study psychoanalyzed Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, a detailed account of the German Judge's psychotic breakdowns in which he battled against numerous antagonists, from God and the Devil to his own body and lexicon. D. Harlan Wilson's Schreberfiktion case study is at once about, around and beyond Memoirs as well as the many secondary texts it has engendered. As the formerly make-believe aspects of the science fiction genre continue to materialize in the real world, Schreber's pathology becomes more and more relevant; his imagination and intellect, his anxiety and dread, his solipsism and megalomania point to the pathological unconscious that animates contemporary technological society. Thoroughly researched and transgressive, The Psychotic Dr. Schreber is part speculative (anti)fiction, part (auto)biography, part theatre-of-the-absurd, part writing tutorial, part literary nonsense and criticism. Wilson riffs on and satirizes post-everything, signaling the inevitable death of the reader and rebirth of the real. Science fiction explored the effects of the New in the Next, the Near and, in some cases, the Now. Galvanized by Schreber, this book maps the next stage: the New in the Never.

The Psychotic Dr. Schreber

Stalking Horse Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Wilson, D. Harlan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Wilson, D. Harlan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Wilson, D. Harlan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

They Live (Cultographies)

J. G. Ballard (Modern Masters of Science Fiction)

J. G. Ballard (Modern Masters of Science Fiction)

The Kafka Effekt

Stranger on the Loose

Necrotic Tissue, Issue #13

They Had Goat Heads

Diegeses

Primordial: An Abstraction

The Psychotic Dr. Schreber