The Kafka Effekt is the debut book of American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 author D. Harlan Wilson

D. Harlan Wilson

D. Harlan Wilson is an American short-story writer and novelist whose body of work has been associated with the genres of irrealism, science fiction, fantasy, horror, bizarro fiction, megalofiction, splatterpunk, absurdism, literary fiction, ultraviolence, and postmodernism...

. It contains forty-four irreal short stories

Short Stories

Short Stories may refer to:*A plural for Short story*Short Stories , an American pulp magazine published from 1890-1959*Short Stories, a 1954 collection by O. E...

 and flash fiction

Flash fiction

Flash fiction is a style of fictional literature or fiction of extreme brevity. There is no widely accepted definition of the length of the category...

 and has been said to combine the milieu's of Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...

 and William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs

William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...

. Along with Carlton Mellick III

Carlton Mellick III

Carlton Mellick III is an American author currently residing in Portland, Oregon. He is best known as one of the leading authors in the 'Bizarro' movement in underground literature....

's Satan Burger, Vincent Sakowski's Some Things Are Better Left Unplugged, Hertzan Chimera's Szmonhfu, Kevin L. Donihe's Shall We Gather at the Garden? and M.F. Korn's Skimming the Gumbo Nuclear, The Kafka Effekt was among the first books jointly released by Bizarro fiction

Bizarro fiction

Bizarro fiction is a contemporary literary genre, which often utilizes elements of absurdism, satire, and the grotesque, along with pop-surrealism and genre fiction staples, in order to create subversive works that are as weird and entertaining as possible. The term was adopted in 2005 by the...

 publisher Eraserhead Press. Pieces in this collection originally appeared in magazines and journals such as Redsine, Doorknobs & BodyPaint, The Dream Zone, The Dream People, Samsara Quarterly and The Café Irreal. The Kafka Effekt also includes the story "The Cocktail Party," which was adapted into a short film of the same name by graphic artist and filmmaker Brandon Duncan in 2006.

Table of Contents

• Warning on a Person
• Boyeraqueri Bubbolifiticus's Body
• Inside the Tin Man
• A Description
• Beneath the Husband
• The Man and I
• Schoolgirl Road Rage
• Babyface
• Feet
• The Lost Item
• Stagefright
• Room
• The Message
• The Walls
• Punch Line
• Circus
• The Professors
• The Eyeballs
• The Nose
• The Mouths
• The Chin
• The Cocktail Party
• Bed Head
• Brain
• At the Funeral
• The Man in the Thick Black Spectacles
• Details of a Conference Room
• The Beef Tips
• The Stranger in the Manhole
• The Eagle-Headed Man at the Airport
• Conversation with a Hair Stylist
• Antiface
• The Wiener Dog on the Ceiling
• My Mother's Pillows
• Look'd Too Near
• The Truth About Humpty Dumpty
• Erotic Poem
• The Cape
• The Book
• Story on the Sphere
• Hogan Marsupial
• A Concern
• The Equation
• In Supercalifragilistic City

Themes

The Kafka Effekt is a multigeneric pastiche of absurdism

Absurdism

In philosophy, "The Absurd" refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek value and meaning in life and the human inability to find any...

, magic realism

Magic realism

Magic realism or magical realism is an aesthetic style or genre of fiction in which magical elements blend with the real world. The story explains these magical elements as real occurrences, presented in a straightforward manner that places the "real" and the "fantastic" in the same stream of...

, humor, surrealism

Surrealism

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....

, science fiction

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

, postmodernism

Postmodernism

Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...

, horror

Horror fiction

Horror fiction also Horror fantasy is a philosophy of literature, which is intended to, or has the capacity to frighten its readers, inducing feelings of horror and terror. It creates an eerie atmosphere. Horror can be either supernatural or non-supernatural...

, the airport novel

Airport novel

Airport novels represent a literary genre that is not so much defined by its plot or cast of stock characters, as much as it is by the social function it serves...

, literary fiction

Literary fiction

Literary fiction is a term that came into common usage during the early 1960s. The term is principally used to distinguish "serious fiction" which is a work that claims to hold literary merit, in comparison from genre fiction and popular fiction . In broad terms, literary fiction focuses more upon...

 and bizarro fiction

Bizarro fiction

Bizarro fiction is a contemporary literary genre, which often utilizes elements of absurdism, satire, and the grotesque, along with pop-surrealism and genre fiction staples, in order to create subversive works that are as weird and entertaining as possible. The term was adopted in 2005 by the...

. Wilson's characters consistently struggle to come to terms with the ultraviolence

Ultraviolence

Ultraviolence is an industrial/techno band formed in London in 1991 and headed by 'the Quentin Tarantino of techno' Johnny Violent . To date, they have released five studio albums, including a ten-year retrospective, and six EPs/singles...

 that distinguishes their daily lives. Stories often unite the aesthetics of pop culture and literary theory

Literary theory

Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of...

.

External links

• Official D. Harlan Wilson website
• Wildclown Chronicle Review by author G. Wells Taylor
• Review by James Michael White at SFReader.com
• Interview with Wilson on The Kafka Effekt at Word Riot