Everything Is Awful and You're a Terrible Person by Daniel Zomparelli; Arsenal Pulp Press, $15.95
Though the title of poet and Poetry Is Dead magazine founder Daniel Zomparelli's new collection of 32 stories Everything Is Awful and You're a Terrible Person would suggest an angry tantrum is in store for readers, that's just a tiny piece of the larger tapestry the prolific Canadian author paints over the course of his debut.
In press materials, the author reveals that the title came to him during a particularly rough patch in his life, a gloomy time that he admits mirrors the nation's current political climate. Much of the entries in the book form astute meditations on the nature of happiness, misery, and "the different ways queers center themselves around happiness, and how heteronormative ideals of happiness can mess with that." Relationships are simply not in the cards for these boys.
The collection is gloriously diverse in style, length, and content, with subject matter ranging from a pair of boyfriends commingling in an open relationship with the ghost of an ex, guys who choose to live-stream their relationship break-up in full Internet real-time realness, and a particularly resonant if pessimistic story equating pie and the challenge of dating in 2017, and how, like after a first date, "the pie is already a day old, the crust already soggy at the base. Its flakiness turning to mush."
Some entries amount to single-page flash fiction comprised of a text message conversation between potential (and eventually crash-and-burn) Grindr hook-ups who block each other after exchanging X-rated pics, and gay co-workers embroiled in the mean-girl kind of office cubicle melodrama that ends with one spewing, "You know no one really likes you here, right?"
There's also a ton of random boy-boy encounters with men named "MuscGuy," "ChillAndLaidBackDude," "ThatDude," and "WhatsHisFace," who meet up to get off. Yet most result in hurt feelings and cocky, arrogant dismissals. Zomparelli also includes some surreal material, which manages to rise above some of the more banal, castaway yarns, and includes a monster who laments the fact that his human skin suit has become ill-fitting.
A lot of the material here orbits on the mean-spirited, but it helps to remember that it's fiction (fact-fiction, perhaps, Mr. Zomparelli?), even though that voice in the background certainly echoes the current state of dating and relationships in the gay community. It's clear that the book's cast is made up primarily of self-absorbed, Botox-shooting 20-year-olds whose consideration for each other flies out the window once they've either had their fun wasting your time, or had an orgasm and want you to leave their apartment �" like, now, k?
Their theme casts a melancholy tone on the the later stories, which seem more fully realized but no sunnier than their predecessors. What readers are left with is that paranoid, sinking feeling that their closest friends may not really like them after all, that someone is talking shit about them behind their back, that even completely detached, anonymous sex has lasting emotional consequences. Then a message on a cell phone app seals the deal: "You have unread messages from a user who has blocked you." The show must go on, right?