Review of Idylle Night’s Detachable Doom by Luke Delin

The 3rd novel by the author I’ve read.

They are typically read quickly. In collage fashion, the author transposes scenes and character perspectives, layering them. What results is a series of vignettes that will amuse as often as they challenge reader expectations.
A woman named Harold steals a barbecue sauce recipe from a notable burger chain. Eccentric descriptions of quirky individuals arise on every page. Witty repartee highlights everyone’s inner angst. We get some tangles with mobsters, and various hilarious scenarios involving a film project and a writer who is aimlessly pursuing an ineffective writing break. Absurdist postmodern flavors abound. While one person is getting high off a meteorite another is theorizing about non-Euclidian geometry. Humor, cynicism and a drifter’s disregard for propriety carry us through this unpredictable narrative.
The charm and Pynchonian energy of this digestible novel are antidotes to ordinary realist fiction.
Delin provides a much-needed break from the mundane with his unholy conjuring of eccentric characters riffing off one another. These conversations are a little like the ones you might’ve had with your pals in the golden age of your youth, when late nights bled into bleary mornings and everything everyone was saying began to seem brilliant beyond belief. The structure is surprising, unconventional, and will require rolling your mind up the learning curve. That is why I’d recommend you pick up his other two novel first: Mneme’s Stoned, and Orbo and the Godhead. There is a smattering of British dialects I’d be hard-pressed to label. They seem realistic, though I wouldn’t be able to tell either way.
One of my fave lines:
“the burnt coffee at the self-service machine tasted like the blurb of a bad memoir.”
Such skewed uses of figurative language are signatures of the author’s style.
Characters frequently question reality. The hexagon is the most efficient shape in nature for tessellation, we are told. Scenes are built around such concepts. Often the absurd reactions other people have around authors form the centerpieces of entertaining segments. At book signings, readings, release parties and social situations, why are author conversations so awkward? This book posits that they’re on another wavelength, in touch with a hidden reality, perhaps enlightened in more than one sense – or cracked from the perspective of those on the outside. An author always sounds desperate when they are describing their own book. The listener always stares blankly into space, uncomprehending because a book cannot be summed up in one minute in a way that really conveys its power. Every writer knows the feeling on that disappointment when we simply cannot translate our enthusiasm to another human. There is terror in the fact that we are enclosed in our own bubble of self-created meaning, and other people will only ever glimpse hints of our inner life.
Authors see things, know things. And there is always the impetus to write, a hunger which cannot be appeased, a seeking after meaning, a soul-hurt, and a distance from societal acceptance.
We find solace only in words.