Welcome to another installment of If My Book, the Monkeybicycle feature in which authors compare their recently released books to weird things. This week Jason Fisk writes about The Craigslist Incident, his new novel out from Unsolicited Press.
If The Craigslist Incident were a piece of furniture, it would be a psychologist’s couch. After hearing client’s stories day after day, the couch would most likely be nonjudgmental and understanding of various clients, if not downright sympathetic. The Craigslist Incident starts with a young woman taking an advertisement out in the Women Seeking Men section of Craigslist, saying that she wants to take a hit out on herself, and a young man answers that advertisement. The novel delves into these two character’s backstories and explores what drove them to such a catastrophic point.
If The Craigslist Incident were a mother-daughter relationship, it would be that moment when the daughter calls her mother at 3:00 am from the police station because she got arrested for public intoxication. I’m a parent, and I do everything I can to prevent bad things from happening to my kids. There is one wildcard in that whole calculation, though, and that is the kid’s freewill, one of the many uncontrollable and terrifying aspects of parenting. The novel is that phone call.
If The Craigslist Incident were a pair of shoes, it would be a new pair of running shoes. There’re a little too snug, and they caused blisters the first time you went running in them, and you want to take them back, but you can’t because you really like way they look, and they make you about an inch taller, and you’ve already worn them way too many times for the clerk to believe that you only wore them once.
If The Craigslist Incident were a football game, it would be that moment when there is only time to run one more play, and the team with the ball needs to score a touchdown to win. The ball is snapped, the quarterback drops back, cocks his arm and throws a forty-yard hail-Mary pass to the wide receiver in the end zone; does he catch it? The story is told in dual-character storylines. You know that the two characters will meet, but you don’t know what will happen when they do. Will they go through with the murder?
If the ending of The Craigslist Incident were a simple machine, it would be a pressure relief valve.
Jason Fisk lives and writes in the suburbs of Chicago. He has worked in a psychiatric unit, labored in a cabinet factory, and mixed cement for a bricklayer. He currently teaches language arts to eighth graders. He was born in Ohio, raised in Minnesota, and has spent the last few decades in the Chicago area. He recently had a collection of poetry published by Kelsay Books: Sub Urbane. He also had a number of books and chapbooks published: Sadly Beautiful, essays, poems, and short stories published by Leaf Garden Press; Salt Creek Anthology, a collection of micro-fiction published by Chicago Center for Literature and Photography; the fierce crackle of fragile wings, a collection of poetry published by Six Gallery Press; and two poetry chapbooks: The Sagging: Spirits and Skin, and Decay, both published by Propaganda Press.
