A Sick Gray Laugh
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Award-winning author Noelle Cashman is no stranger to depression and anxiety. In fact, her entire authorial brand, showcased in such titles as The Girl with the Gun in Her Mouth, Leather Noose, and The Breath Curse, has been built on the hopeless phantasmagoric visions she experiences when in the grip of paranoid psychosis. But Noelle has had enough, and, author brand be damned, has found help for her illness in the form of an oblong yellow pill, taken twice daily.
Since starting on this medication, Noelle’s symptoms have gone into remission. She’s taken up jogging. She’s joined a softball team. For the first time in Noelle’s life, she feels hope. She’s even started work on a nonfiction book, a history of her small southern Indiana town.
But then Noelle starts to notice the overwhelming Grayness that dominates her neighborhood, slathered over everything like a thick coat of snot, threatening to assimilate all.
From Bram Stoker Award-winning author Nicole Cushing comes A Sick Gray Laugh, a novel about madness, depression, history, Utopian cults, literature, sports, and all the ways we struggle to stay sane in an insane world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A wholly erratic and unstable narrator drives this kooky, outlandish tale. Noelle Cashman whose name's similarity to Cushing's is not coincidental is a prolific, award-winning author known for her sadistic fiction. With her mental illness recently regulated by medication, she's forced to find inspiration outside her own head. She decides to write about "an overwhelming Grayness" she perceives around the community of Naumpton, Ind. Both Cushing's novel and Noelle's work in-progress explore the fictional town's history, introducing religious fanatics shrouded in black veils and a matriarchal order with doctrines rooted in rejecting submission to men. Noelle asserts the Grayness took hold because of these groups' assimilation into right-wing, patriarchal Midwestern culture, and gradually succumbs to the notion that constructing her own cult is the only possible relief from the mundane. Cushing constructs a convincing portrayal of someone rationalizing away their lunacy, but it can be laborious to read. Likewise, the Naumpton history lesson is lengthy enough to be dry, but Cushing (The Sadist's Bible) keeps it lively with clever parody, including a charity event in which participants donate guns so homeless people can exercise their Second Amendment rights. Noelle's story will suit readers who want to experience true disconnection from reality.
