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Dermaphoria
by Craig Clevenger
Product Group: Book
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage (2005-10-01)
ISBN: 1931561753
EAN: 9781931561754
Dewy Decimal #: 813.6
Hardcover: 250 pages
SKU: 08030164
Condition: Like New Like New
Comments: Hardcover. Like new cover and text. Like new dust jacket with very minor shelfwear. Near Fine condition. Beautiful book.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Clandestine chemistry and the L.A. underworld provide the atmosphere for this tale of painful lost memories and the heartbreak of finding them.
Eric Ashworth awakens in jail, unable to remember how he got there or why. His only memory is a woman’s name: Desiree.
Bailed out and holed up in a low-rent motel, Eric finds the solution to his amnesia in a strange new hallucinogen. By synthesizing the sense of touch, the drug produces a disjointed series of sensations that slowly allow Eric to remember his former life as a clandestine chemist. With steadily increasing doses, Eric reassembles his past at the expense of his grip on the present, and his distinction between truth and fantasy crumbles as his paranoia grows in tandem with his tolerance.
In Dermaphoria Clevenger creates a visceral world where divisions between love and loss, violence and tenderness, and fact and fiction prove to be less discernible than they ought to be.
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Customer Reviews
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Spiders and Bugs
Rating  (3)
Date: 2008-11-23
Lots of spiders, bugs, and colors in Clevenger's second novel, Dermaphoria - maybe too many for a person without the prerequisite delusional mindset to follow the story which is in there somewhere. Briefly, our hero, Eric Ashworth, is a master alchemist who creates varieties of methamphetamines and hallucinogens for an illicit market that constantly craves new designer spinoffs of the traditional favorite mind benders. Eric is hounded by his bosses who put up the money for Eric's r & d and he is haunted by the image of the beautiful image of Desiree, although we're never quite certain who Desiree is. But that's Ok because Eric can hardly figure it out either. As a result of a drug production explosion, Eric weaves in and out of amnesia and delusional euphoria.
On the other hand, Clevenger is a terrific writer. I read his first novel, The Contortionist, twice. I loved it and even wrote a letter to him saying so (to which he graciously responded). Although this is not The Contortionist, Clevenger still manages to teach us about a world that very few of us can possibly understand and gives us some great lessons in chemistry that our school teachers never touched on. You can have a good experience reading Dermaphoria once you set aside the need for a story to move, in linear fashion, from one scene to the next.
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Twisty Sizzler!
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-07-21
This book wouldn't leave me alone. From the very first page I was hooked. What is real? What is drug-induced fantasy? And is there a place to stand between the two? I don't want to say much about the story--the hooks have already been written above--but I will say the the writing is beautiful and shifty and noir, and this is an author worth reading. And watching!
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If anyone close to you has been addicted...
Rating (5)
Date: 2008-06-05
To any sort of hard drug, you MUST read this book.
A shockingly large improvement in writing style and story development since his last book (Contortionist's Handbook, which is also excellent). Dermaphoria is a love story, and an epic coming of age piece all rolled into one. Maintaining a clear style despite a clouded narrator's perspective and using ever sharpening wit, Clevenger does well keeping the reader in tune with the story as the narrator races to bring back memories lost in a lab accident while being pursued simultaneously by the police and the group that funded the drug lab that blew his memory to smithereens. While slowly revealing how all this happened Clevenger gracefully shifts in and out of ponderings on the morality and philosophy of drug use. A must read.
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His second is just as good as his first.
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-10-28
Really loved this one too. CC is a vivid, intense writer, one of my all-time favorites.
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absolutely brilliant
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-06-04
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Captivating diction, brilliant imagery, and I especially love the jaded & cynical monologue of the protagonist. Clevenger effectively brings the real mechanics of paranoia to the forefront of the reader's attention; and not in a stupid or adolescent manner. He brings you into the fear and sickness, the world falling apart around you. The enemy always watching, the codes they speak, the patterns they manipulate into your reality.
He makes me want to throw out all my manuscripts and never write again. Terribly jealous, esp w/ the use of bugs & chemistry as the metaphors for reality breakdown.
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