Confused and frightened, Eric Ashworth wakes up, ponders his surrounding, and frantically tries to control his sensory overload as he proclaims "one memory after the next turns yellow at the edges and crumbles to flakes at my touch. I smell rotted pulp, old newspapers crawling with silverfish, the dank dissolving bindings of books I don't remember reading." With this statement, Eric struggles to grip the remains of his memory and in doing so, he signals to the reader that Dermaphoria is no ordinary novel because Craig Clevenger dissolves the binding of mundane story telling. Eric's medical problems gives him "chills that turn to sandpaper on my neck and shoulders." And although Eric's sensations caused by an unexplained explosion that burned much of his body, the reader's chills are a result of Clevenger's eerie and original images.
Eric Ashworth is in jail, horrifically burned, incapable of remembering how or why he got there, unable to seize the memories that float at the edge of his mind like an ocean at low-tide, never quite coming in enough for him to fully dive in, and the only constant is a woman's name: Desiree. Bailed out, Ashworth hides in a cheap motel room and endeavors to piece together his life and memory. A cutting edge hallucinogen that mimics the sense of touch elicits a disjointed array of sensations that allows Ashworth to piece together his former life as a covert chemist. With increasing doses, and pressure from both cops and his former criminal associates, Ashworth reassembles his past identity at the expense of destroying his grip on the present.
The lost memory plot device recalls Christopher Nolan's 2000 film Memento although their protagonists wouldn't be able to make the connection and the medical confusion of the opening scene is reminiscent of Rupert Thomson's 1996 novel The Insult. But comparisons end at plot discussions. Clevenger's innovative scenes and haunting images scar this territory as his own. With language like this, it's easy to see why Chuck Palahniuk called Clevenger's first novel, The Contortionist's Handbook, "the best book I have read in easily five years. Easily. Maybe ten years."
Not content to simply describe a character with the mundane adjective "skinny," Clevenger writes: "he could be stretched across a set of crossbeams in a cornfield as easily as he could be flesh and blood." Instead of casually mentioning an approaching summer thunderstorm, Clevenger conjures up: "sky the color of dead flies, an unbroken sheet of clouds carried on a warm wind that smells of electricity and flowers." A less dedicated writer might offhandedly say a villain is evil, but Clevenger summons the bad guy with: "goddamned Boo Radley with a chloroform rag and a bone saw."
Reading the first few chapters of Dermaphoria is gleefully confusing, a hallucinogenic labyrinth, an intoxicating funhouse of mirrors, which challenges and entices. Even when plot twists and turns aren't immediately clear, the novel provides a narrow thread of reality to pull the reader through the maze of Eric's memories and perceptions.
While the police and former criminal associates circle Eric like vultures, he has a few precious days of freedom to try to figure out what has happened to him. Pushed by Detective Ainslinger to share information, prodded by his attorney Morrell to not say a word, and facing substantial jail time, Eric slowly begins to find the answers everyone seeks. He meets Manhattan White who reveals that he was Eric's boss in Research and Development. White, in turn, reported to Mr. Hoyle.
Hoyle runs his drug operation like a Fortune 500 company and instead of telling arrested employees to not rat out their colleagues, the organization simply reminds them of their Nondisclosure Agreement. Enforcing the corporation's policies and procedures is White's developmentally disabled, but horrifically skilled son, Toe Tag. "He can gut, cut and pack a grown man into a garbage bag in under 40 minutes. He's still just a child in most ways, always will be. But he's got a knack for the job." If an employee, facing prison time like Eric, decides to betray the organization, then Toe Tag is dispatched to issue a severance package.
Eric is able to piece together his lofty chemical position within this organization that made him a legend among law enforcement officials and outlaws alike. Prior to his accident, Eric ran an impeccable outfit, disciplined and highly-trained. But a dangerous reaction began to build when:
... one of White's stuttering lab geeks gave word that a coyote by the handle of High Tail had gone supernova between drops, scorching his ghost onto a patch of Route 127 like a Nagasaki flash shadow. I was carrying four pounds of lysergic acid amides in my trunk when I stopped to check my messages from a gas station pay phone. Otto was wiping dragonfly guts from my windshield when I heard the black magic word assigned to the signal man working Gotham. "Hindenburg." Dial tone.
The enflamed zeppelin is a fitting image to describe the way Eric's life was thrown into tumult. And when he remembers the explosive accident of his past, he realizes his future is even more precarious. As his memory begins to return, determined to stay alive and out of jail, Eric reclaims portions of his memory and Dermaphoria builds towards an edge of a climax that is worthy of the most accomplished noir novel. However, in the end, it is Craig Clevenger's facility with image and description that transforms this novel into something much more than the usual crime caper book. Clevenger creates images that are shockingly original and yet absolutely, undeniably accurate. These images and depictions appear throughout this novel like the fleeting sensations of the protagonist. And as a junkie chases that perfect high, Clevenger's readers devour each word of this fine novel, desperately awaiting his next perfect image.
— 1 February 2006
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