The Kafka Effekt

infobox Book |
name = The Kafka Effekt


author = D. Harlan Wilson
cover_artist = Brandon Duncan
country = United States
language = English
series =
genre = Irrealism, Bizarro fiction, Postmodernism
publisher = Eraserhead Press
release_date = November 2001
media_type = Print
pages = 211 pp
isbn = ISBN 0-9713572-1-8
preceded_by =
followed_by = Stranger on the Loose

"The Kafka Effekt" (2001) is the debut book of American author D. Harlan Wilson. It contains forty-four irreal short stories and flash fiction and has been said to combine the milieu's of Franz Kafka and William S. Burroughs. Along with Carlton Mellick III'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 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, magic realism, humor, surrealism, science fiction, postmodernism, horror, the airport novel, literary fiction and bizarro fiction. Wilson's characters consistently struggle to come to terms with the ultraviolence that distinguishes their daily lives. Stories often unite the aesthetics of pop culture and literary theory.

Trivia

Wilson altered the spelling of Effect to Effekt in the title of his book not as a reference to Franz Kafka (or Kafka's protagonists Josef K. and K. in his respective novels The Trial and The Castle) but as a reference to his favorite cereal, Special K.Fact|date=July 2008 The allusion to Kafka is merely a convenient coincidence.

External links

* [http://www.dharlanwilson.com Official D. Harlan Wilson website]
* [http://www.wildclown.com/chronicle/year2/issue1/dharlanwilson.html Wildclown Chronicle Review by author G. Wells Taylor]
* [http://www.sfreader.com/read_review.asp?book=106 Review by James Michael White] at [http://www.sfreader.com/ SFReader.com]
* [http://www.wordriot.org/template.php?ID=227 Interview with Wilson on "The Kafka Effekt"] at Word Riot