Lockpick Pornography, Joey Comeau

Getting away from vampires, I got a copy of Joey Comeau's Lockpick Pornography. For those of you who don't know, Joey does the writing half of A Softer World, which has become one of my favorite new(ish) online comics out there.

The book wasn't at all what I was expecting (after reading ASW, I imagined the book would be more experimental-prosey, one-sentence constructed stuff). What I got was a strange amalgamation—if Ellis and Palahniuk had a love child, this is what it would be like.

Our protagonist is a radical gay-rights advocate, lost in trying to decide if love is hormones or actually deserves monogomy; caught up in an Ellis-like world where characters never can say what they want and, as such, the miscommunication is outrageous, he decides that the best course of action is to take a radical step in helping the world come to terms with gay life—by writing a children's book and distributing it by disguising himself (and his friends) as supposedly gay cartoon characters and breaking into schools to leave it among the other books on the shelves.

When it's clear that deeper, more profound action is needed, he takes his friends (one a sometimes lover and two newly-met girls: a lesbian who is sure of herself and a sexually ambiguous 17 year old who can't decide whether she wants to be identified as a girl or a gay man) on a Palahniuk-esque journey to stike directly at the home life of a bigot politician and, more importantly, his kid who is growing up hateful.

The whole book took me under a day to read, and was so hilarious at parts (big-titty eleven year old) that I cracked up in the middle of working (between shooting finish-wood base and trim to door frames and walls in a 600 thousand dollar condo in Sun Valley, Idaho), which prompted my not-so-liberal but still lovable father to shoot me some pretty strange looks. You can't really explain the comedy to anyone, least of all a slight Republican who hasn't even known any gay men or women in his life. Especially when the comedy comes directly from extreme sexual episodes and covert-terrorism.

All in all, I was heavily impressed—not what I expected in the realm of experimental, but very satisfying as a novel about inter- and intra-personal communication. Personally, I'd like to see someone pull half the stuff that is done in this novel; people need to be frightened to understand, I think. And the gay rights movement isn't making as much progress as it should be.

Overall, a brilliant first novel. But Joey: I'm expecting more from the next one.