Sorehead

All Howard Plumber's friends from the bygone Denver punk poetry scene have moved away to popular cities like New York or L.A. during the months of his hospitalization, and all his more recent allies from Vermont's experimental Power Mountain college and graduate school live in locations equally distant. The internet keeps Howard everywhere, a kind of selective omniscience enabling his interactions on Facebook with an infamous imprisoned cult leader named Hal Blare; an intimate of controversial late comedian Roberta Bogchar's inner circle, who may or may not be a secret agent in disguise; and countless other anti-famous notables. Apparitions from pop culture (among them TV's Gabe Kotter and the Carson McCullers character Frankie Addams) have begun to appear in Howard's daily interaction, implying he's either mentally unbalanced or extra perceptive about some unspecified shift society is undergoing. Charmed by appearing women fictional and actual (or neither) (or both) and tortured by a sense of incompleteness as more and more fathers are taken from him, Howard follows peace symbols in the sidewalk cracks and tries to win a living as a creative artist of some kind, a dying art. The webzine's fan page on the social network Facebook, which he uses as a bulletin board for newsworthy items, becomes a virtual map of the apparent self contradiction engendered by this transformation, where anything can be proven and nothing is meant to be. Set triply in Howard's life in Denver, his memories of grad school on the East Coast, and the no-man's-everywhere inhabited by his cartoon doppelganger, Dim Jim Driscoll, Sorehead is colored by Howard's commitment to psychoemotional transfiguration.