Insidious Squalor

Insidious Squalor is a surreal and hilarious neo noir novel by Damian Westfall, the author of Finnegan Begin Again and Sir Gawain: an epic poem. Dreamlike and absurd, Insidious Squalor is not just another novel, rather, it is a suggestion for a new style of the novel that is both cinematic and cathartic as it is avant-garde.

Bill Davenport is a gay drug addict, a writer, and sometimes an exterminator, who exists in a strange and bizarre alternate dimension called Aljahim, a world that resembles a North African port town filled with crazed sadistic doctors, an endless array of secret agents, super villains, giant ten-foot-long centipedes, talking insects, inter-dimensional creatures and a whole host of drugs found only in Aljahim.

From the author's Preface:

"Let me be frank with you, my readers. While this is a new and original novel, it did not originate in a vacuum ex nihilo. This novel grew fresh in my mind but only after I had spent most of my life gestating literary seeds I had consumed as a youth, in the form of the books of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, the works of William S. Burroughs and the 1990 David Cronenberg film Naked Lunch. Insidious Squalor, this my new novel, is not an adaptation of any of these author's works, nor is it trying to imitate or copy these authors. Instead it attempts to synthesize elements from all four sources and come up with something new. I am not wanting to mimic or posture Burroughs, rather I want to stand on his shoulders and go further and in new directions having learned everything I could from him in both what to do and what not to do.

I began reading William S. Burroughs in 7th grade in 1990 at the age of 13. Soon after that, David Cronenberg released his film meditation on Burroughs called Naked Lunch, and because it was rated R and about homosexuality and drug use, my parents wouldn't allow me a 13 year old to see the film or read the book Naked Lunch by Burroughs. I instead read other books by Burroughs such as Exterminator!, Place of Dead Roads, Blade Runner, and Nova Express. I was desperate to see and read Naked Lunch, but I was forbidden, so I bought a lot of movie magazines and cut out all the articles and pictures of Cronenberg's film. I then tried imagining what this forbidden book and film were all about and would dream of them using the few elements I knew about them.

Years later as an adult, I read Naked Lunch and saw the film by Cronenberg and was completely disappointed. The book and the movie I was trying to picture in my mind was better to me than the actual source material.

So, taking a few elements from the film (Such as a talking insect and taking bug powder as a hallucinatory drug) and from the novel (The character of a psychotic, insane super powerful Doctor and the idea of a drug made from the bodies of giant aquatic centipedes and a freeport north African town which Burroughs called Interzone), I created a new story, a new myth, a new novel, starting where Burroughs left off and going in a new direction."