Twisted Fun

Contents of Twisted Fun

The Dragon
Our Records Show
The Drummer
The Masseuse
Go Like This
The Mattress
These Scissors
The Bus Driver
Desert Planet
The Party
Eat Grass
The Door
Caught
The New Cheryl
Ideology at Play
American T-shirts
No Longer
Opt Out
Self-Publishing
America's Funniest Traffic-Light Surveillance Videos!
Lines of Credit
Hot Hot Hot Cocoa Opportunity
Unenforceable Rules for Unplayable Games
Enlightenment of a Teen Pop Star
The Best Me I Can Be
Won't It Be Nice
Bad Women
The Brain
The Judge
Terminally Curious
For Example, Morley Thompson
The Recruiter
The Hermit
The Names in the Case
Birth of an Immortalist

"The carnival is in full tilt when you step into one of his stories, but Barringer has a way of making you feel at home among the freaks in his deliciously weird worlds."

—Adam Pieroni, Quick Fiction

"Barringer's stories will, at first, seem safe and friendly. Then, before you know it, they'll have wrapped themselves around you and sunk their teeth deep into your neck. And you'll love every minute of it."

—Steven Seighman, Monkeybicycle

"A literary force to be reckoned with. Barringer's work reminds me of the offspring of Larry Brown and George Saunders, with more pathos."

-Nathan Leslie, The Pedestal Magazine

Some stories in Twisted Fun first appeared in:

Quick Fiction
Pindeldyboz
42Opus
In Posse Review
Sex Light Anthology
Small Spiral Notebook
Wisconsin Review
Tatlin's Tower
Raised in a Barn
Boom! For Real
Word Riot Anthology
Opium Magazine
Dezmin's Archives
Hobart Magazine
Prose Toad
Haypenny, and
Sweet Fancy Moses.

READERS

"David, I ordered the book, Twisted Fun, from you in the recent past. I read the entire book during a layover in an airport in Puerto Rico. And I still haven't stopped talking about it. I am very picky anymore about what I spend my time reading, and I must say that your writing is worth every minute."_Kristina M.

"I finished Twisted Fun and thoroughly enjoyed it. My favorite is the story with the replacement robot wife. Just sublime. Have you submitted that to short-story competitions? It's just so rich. I tend to be drawn to the less experimental stuff: the essay about your grandpa's business cards, the more traditional format stories. The final vampire piece where you go into a parallel universe and describe the complete development of a human being with a lot of hyphens: just thought that bit was dynamite." _Todd N.

A collection of fiction, parody, satire, essay, photo, art, design, and more, Twisted Fun is an intense energetic romp: witty, imaginative, visual, hilarious.

In "The Dragon," a knight interviews a candidate for the position of mythological nemesis. In "The Mattress," a couple drags into the foyer their old mattress and bids it a rather public farewell.

In other stories, a father teaches his kids the game of Eat Grass, an abused spouse replaces herself with a Homebot, a masseuse confronts her estranged father, a bus driver behaves badly, a baby flies through a window, a teen pop star seeks enlightenment, travelers escort a brain across a desert, the heart of sixteen-year-old Morley Thompson breaks, a high-school kid armwrestles a wheelchair-bound Harvard recruiter, and in the final long story, "Birth of an Immortalist," Alex Smith wakes the morning after a job interview to find himself employed by immortal vampire lawyers:

"You have a new life now, Alex," says Dean Carson, the old man sitting across from Alex in the hotel restaurant. "We'll be talking a lot in the next few days. I'm here for you."

Alex tenders his sore nose, which needs more than one morning to regain its original shape and tone after its nightlong smushing against the hard carpeted floor of his hotel room. "I don't feel like myself."

"One day," says Dean, covering his bowl with a cloth napkin, "you will be as far from yourself today as you are from who you were yesterday. I'll get you a new briefcase. And don't worry. You'll live."

Other pieces run the comic gamut. A credit-card statement tells a love story, if you read between the lines. A writer, hoping to have his novel self-published, writes a query letter to himself. "Our Records Show" starts with the first line of a letter from a catalog company ("Our records show you recently purchased our Women's Cashmere Baby Sling (BS 45)") and wrings from it a poetic litany:

Our records show that you are afraid of growing old. This is common.

Our records show that art and entertainment depicting suffering in the world may simply add to the suffering in the world. We are confused.

Our records show that no one owns the spaces between the stars. We can't believe this. Who do we talk to?

In the middle of the book, several works of satire appear untitled and unannounced, apropos of junk mail, spam, brochures, and surveillance reports. In one, a company representative announces more and more bad news, seemingly as it happens: "Last month, FirstinLine.com was bought out by WishTell Futures, Inc. All current customers of FirstinLine.com will continue to be served through the services of WishTell Futures. However, WishTell Futures went out of business and sold whatever was left of its software assets, including FirstinLine Privacy Software and OptiVexation Pro, to Ms. Amartya Roop of Bombay, India." And a satire of spam emails, "Hot Hot Hot Cocoa Opportunity," takes investment solicitation to new heights of disturbingly plausible absurdity. Jefferson Bush Mandela, Jr., of Abidjan Cote d'Ivoire, wants to transfer money into your bank account and move to the U.S. to live with you because "like Americans, we also want to kill people and drink pop-a-cola and enlarge our penis to twice its natural size."

There is a little of the best of everything in this collection of Twisted Fun, including illustration, graphic art, vintage photography, and a personal essay, "The Names in the Case," which was recognized as a Notable Essay in the Best American Essays 2007, edited by David Foster Wallace.

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For information, contact David Barringer at dlbarringer AT gmail DOT com.
David Barringer is an author, freelance writer, graphic designer, artist,
and father of two future mad designer-baby scientists.
All work copyrighted David Barringer 2000-2008.