Her skin was brilliant with her sexy Persian melon glow. Last night when she’d been albino white, her breastbone had turned red. It had looked like neon tubing beneath her pale skin, lighting up her chest with a diffused glow. (“Oh, boy,” had been her opinion during their movements then.) Now the same soft glow was all over her body, but in Persian melon orange instead of red.
      “You fill my head with dirty thoughts,” he said. “Why are you so smart?”
      “Come on back to the Dog,” she said. “I’ll show you smart.”
      “Will you 2 make your sex deals somewhere else,” said the superstitious goren next to her, putting the finishing touches on his wafer temple to the nasty gods who ordered playing cards. “Some of us are here to concentrate on our cards.”
      Noreen turned to look at him.
      “Imagine taking a game seriously whose most difficult feature is the requirement that you be able to count to 21,” Noreen gestured at the felt layout with toxic scorn. “You must be a very special person.” She turned to Spike. “He possesses an intuition so powerful it can compel the hostile soldiers of Chance to abandon their weapons and line up to suck on his knee.”
      “I wish to speak to the manager,” said the unshaven mouth. “I’ll talk to the manager.”
      “Why don’t you go get a manicure 1st.” suggested Spike. “You can’t shake hands with the manager using those fingers. A shave would do no damage either. You want to meet the boss looking like a drunk?”

Begin your fall through Jake, Nevada with this all black print on white background. With no illustrations, no graffiti, no photos, this edition is still a story you have never dated before.  >H is no familiar girl wearing a different dress and the same hair as your last 30 efforts to take paterson’s daughter out of her underwear and into the secret corner of your cortex where the real reading happens. This one is rather like reading a public domain reprint of Bleak House, except Chick and Dickens are not the same thing.

A difference which usually solves in favor of Dickens, but, Hey!, who wins that comparison anyway. Here in electronic >H the reader who can go only slightly higher than free will discover that some writing doesn’t need anything beyond Elizabethan black and white.

Like Homer said, “We call this sh^t fiction, but it is real.” 

To which Yeats added. “They say this is a novel, but you can find some truth here.”

So do you want to gamble? Or do you just want to waste time.

      The drive north had taken the beautiful Nash along a corridor of ascending mountains. As Viner, Spike and Noreen waited for the burst where they had stopped on a lesser peak, they could see how Nevada had hunched up behind them in a huge spinal column.
     Far across the great lunar sea of 52, the sun was rising above a tongue of clouds when it seemed to explode.
     They were wearing the special goggles which Viner, a veteran of nuclear tests, kept in his glove compartment. But despite the goggles the incredible spreading of light nearly blinded them. The sun, a small brilliant disc they had been able to stare at directly through the goggles, came rushing past Mercury and Venus, and up the horizon to Nevada, coming so fast it was as big as the sky in an instant.
      Frightened, Viner turned quickly to look at Noreen. There were a hundred tiny lines on her cheeks, and between them, 1,000s of little flakes of dead skin. He could see the minute skin chips with incredible clarity. He looked out the windshield of the Nash. The small scratches on the impeccably polished pearl-grey hood showed as fine white rivulets of wax.
      “What is all this God-forsaken light?” Viner screamed.
      For an instant the light dimmed slightly and he could see all the mountains around them. He jumped out of the Nash. The light came back up to its powerful bleaching intensity. Spike and Noreen jumped out, too.
   Noreen walked stupidly towards the huge achromatic fireball, it had a shape now, it was a mammoth cloud of light climbing the sky like a balloon. It had grown so large and yet was still so near and low, it reduced the momentous humped back of Nevada to a few grey nuggets of dirt spread across a dusty desert floor.
      “It’s not, don’t, don’t” Viner heard himself jabbering. He realized he’d been shouting from the instant the sky had turned into light. “Don’t, oh no, no, not this.”
      “The mountains look small,” said Spike. He sounded far off to himself, feeling like he was admiring a Hudson River landscape in a New Jersey museum.
      The toroid cloud of light seemed like a comet struggling to fly. The strain of lifting off was draining its energy because it lost brilliance as it labored upwards. It sparked with a luminous purple dirt. It was dragging an incredible train of smoke and ash up into the sky. A white halo formed about the sparking ball of purple and silver green. The column of dirt looked like a primitive animal brain stem shooting up into the roiling tormented cloud above it, bloating it until it began to resemble human cortex. It was a couple of miles high now and growing horizontally towards them.
      “The article in Mercury was right,” Viner said. He’d fallen to the ground with shock over what he was seeing and found himself now babbling from the seat of his pants. “It’s a volcano. They’ve crushed through the earth’s crust.”
      The bomb had ripped a hole in the earth and its guts were coming out. A minute passed. The cloud climbed until it was 6 miles high. It was growing towards them as fast as it ascended. Purple, in a rich pleasurable hue, was the color of death, and his own death was coming towards him right now in a noxious cloud of speeding gases. The sulfurous smoke the article had said would be the result of a chain of volcanic eruptions was curling over the desert floor like surf. It would wash a burning suffocating death over them soon.
      The 3 of them looked back and forth between the cloud’s terrifying advance and each other. Without speaking it, they knew they shared the same startling thought. Not only were they dying, so was the world itself. It had been punctured to its volatile core.

This first edition of >H has a terse complexity which shows well against a paterson copying James M. Cain but as genuine as a drag performer operating a Sophie Tucker song.

Click to Buy,
But Try The Other Sh^t First

>H is more than a book about growing up mistaking the bizarre for normal. It is a hundred stories imploded into one narrative about Jake, Nevada, a strange civilization which flourished in 1950s much like Troy flourished in 1180BC before the Greeks arrived with their hostility and generosity.

Watch jakes and physicists contest a modern Trojan war in a narrative not limited to print. The story grows across this website, blooms in photos and illustrations throughout the paperback, and spills red graffiti everywhere between the lines.

When you wander like a Jew of proverbs around the many worldly experiences of >H, you may think, at first, it’s puzzling to have so much swirling around like gut bacteria trying to digest something huge; but that’s not a problem when each part is its own entertainment, related to all the other parts but needing nothing beyond itself to make it intriguing.

During such tumbling down an edition’s pages and reflecting on clues at the website, you should ping Chick with a new >H illustration. Or reform one of Chick’s improperly twisted sentences with a snapshot of your screen. Or bleed new graffiti onto to his monitor.

And let >H spin around the slot machine of your reading mind until the moment you win the alignment which aggregates all the artifices of >H into an emergent creature greater than its parts.

That instant might be the argent appearance of 4 moons in a black sky.