Taylor (Ghostly Demarcations, 2019, etc.) riffs on the current political landscape in this madcap novel in verse.

The shades in Hades aren’t pleased with the way things are going on Earth, so they elect to send one of the dead back to bring peace to the living. Diogenes, the Cynic philosopher from ancient Greece, nominates Victoria Woodhull, the late-19th-century American suffragette, promoter of free love, and one-time candidate for president of the United States. Victoria reluctantly accepts the assignment and is promptly teleported to—of all places—a municipal trash can in Birmingham, Alabama. She quickly befriends Detective Alonzo “Lonz” Rankin, a Louisiana Creole man currently working undercover. Diogenes arrives to help out as well—bringing with him a magic lantern that reveals the honesty in humans—but he feels the mission is endangered by the presence of another emissary: J. Edgar Hoover, sent up by Lord Hades himself. Victoria begins recruiting “Furies”—young free-love acolytes from among the local teens—while Hoover hooks up with the predatory Judge Roy Bean Too, a right-winger who wishes to erect monuments to the Ten Commandments in every Alabama town. As Hoover and Judge Roy launch their political revolution, Diogenes, Victoria, and Alonzo, along with an assortment of odd allies, attempt to restore some measure of reason to a country that is clearly in much worse shape than they thought. Can Victoria truly bring peace to this world? Will Diogenes’ lantern ever shine on an honest human? Will Hot Dog Rita ever get her hot dog franchise? Writing in a mock-epic light verse, Taylor tells his tale with tongue firmly in cheek, even beginning it with a rebuttal to the predicted critiques of self-serious poets: “Defaming poesy’s tongue to crack slim jokes, / ignoring their low tragic. Impolitic, puerile, / he’d used honeyed meter, sweet rhyme to stoke / their pimple moans high, ignite views worthwhile, // attain a laugh just now and then. Such was his style.” With its clever parodies of recognizable figures (Attorney General Bereft Sessions) and laugh-out-loud screwball sensibility, the novel summons to mind public entertainment of previous eras, particularly the comedies of ancient Greece and Rome. For a modern audience, however, this feels like inside baseball. In addition to recognizing all the references, one needs to have a high tolerance for rhyming verse and antiquated syntax. The plot is a bit too silly to inspire investment, and the 150-page poem is a bit too long to hold the reader’s interest. (Something that could have been read in one sitting would have been ideal.) The characters are all quite broad, and Rankin, who speaks in a patois and talks a lot about Voodoo, borders on offensive caricature. One gets the sense that Taylor recognizes that this is a work of fairly limited appeal—he seems to be writing primarily for himself and enjoying every minute of it.

Amusing, but those looking for accessible political satire will find this to be an esoteric and mostly dissatisfying work.

In Taylor’s fantasy novella, two neighbors are seemingly the only people who can see beings that treat human beings as virtual puppets.

Rooftops are the viziers’ domain. The scaly, triple-eyed, invisible creatures essentially control the humans underneath these roofs, seeding ideas and causing hormonal fluctuations. Most viziers are assigned just one roof, but Tiny T in 1970s central Kentucky oversees 14 people living in four buildings. As much as Tiny wants to believe that it has full control over these humans, there are exceptions; sometimes notions that viziers don’t anticipate will pop into a person’s head, for example. Tiny is also trying an experiment with college sophomore Rainey, leaving her alone until sometime after she graduates just to see how her life unfolds under her control. Amazingly, unlike other humans, Rainey can see Tiny and other viziers—an ability she shares with her 17-year-old neighbor BJ. While keeping tabs on Tiny and eavesdropping on its meetings with other viziers, Rainey and BJ catch wind of a particularly unsettling vizier known as “The Fat One.” It’s an enigmatic being of unknown origin, and it makes shockingly accurate predictions—especially the circumstances of humans’ deaths. As years pass, Rainey and BJ grow to fear The Fat One, though they don’t know exactly where it is. They see it as an all-powerful being like “Silent Bob,” which is BJ’s name for God. When a much-older BJ decides to center his horror novel on The Fat One, Rainey worries how the terrifying, apparently omniscient creature will respond.

Much of Taylor’s story has a cheeky tone; Tiny and other viziers, for example, clearly enjoy what they do, and getting humans “tangled in a pregnancy” is particularly amusing to them. (It’s also the reason why they’re troubled by the “whole birth control pill dealie.”) The story initially zeroes in on Tiny, Rainey, and BJ and addresses some of the questions readers will surely have about viziers. For example, although the beings mainly exert their influence from rooftops, this influence can continue when humans are “off-site” if the viziers do their job well. The narrative focus, however, gradually shifts to Rainey and BJ alone and during multiple time periods; the couple are shown from the ’70s through the ’90s, and their older selves are depicted in 2020. Taylor generates smooth time jumps, checking in with Rainey and BJ at school, in their blossoming careers, and dealing with the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Interestingly, the viziers’ absences only elevate the suspense; watching Tiny enjoy its work is engaging, but not knowing where The Fat One might be is nerve-wracking. Rainey and BJ are appealing characters, and their shared ability leads to playful banter, as when Rainey repeatedly corrects BJ when he assigns viziers masculine pronouns: “It….You sexist pig.” The author fits a lot into this short book, but readers shouldn’t expect to have all their questions answered, and the open ending perfectly suits the otherworldly narrative that precedes it.

A delightfully outlandish tale that deftly combines mystery, humor, and bizarre creatures.

Taylor’s collection of short stories revolves around a Kentucky-born man’s life of misadventures and failed romances.

Josey stops by a New Orleans voodoo shop in “The Woman Who Wouldn’t Talk, the Man Who Wouldn’t Listen.” He’s there specifically to see Madame LaBonne, hoping she can do something about his peculiar circumstances—his love, Sally, has run off with another woman. This is just one of 18 stories featuring Josey throughout his life, set in such places as West Palm Beach and his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky. Life has its ups and downs—mostly comical downs—in this collection. Josey winds up on a blind date in the story “Faithful Companion,” in which a woman named Sarah takes him to the dentist’s office next to her apartment. She promises him a surprise, but the dentist’s unforeseen arrival may upend whatever she has planned. Josey gradually develops into the “world’s thinnest fat man”; for the socially inept Josey, the appellation represents the “hot air” he tends to spew. Sometimes he’s a spectator in tales that focus on other characters, from a co-worker who tries to kick alcohol by switching to heroin to the University of Kentucky campus barber who vows to take revenge on whoever kicked a dent into his Cadillac convertible. “Meanwhile on Limestone Street: Time, Mass, and Energy Masquerade as Free Will” best exemplifies this collection’s theme and central character, with its titular street in Lexington sparking memories of ex-lovers and familiar spots, including the U.K. bookstore where Josey was a trade book buyer for five years.

A strange, witty, and not always likable protagonist headlines this assemblage of diverting tales.

A man journeys along a nightmarish path in Taylor’s experimental novel.

Highway 28 West is a desolate place. It’s a stretch of road where “everything takes at least two hours or two days or two months or two years longer than it should,” as one resident puts it. “Unless it’s something bad, and then it happens a lot quicker than it should…” Along its winding route are trailer parks, ponds, and houses of worship like the Eternal Truth of Jesus Christ on Calvary Church. It’s home to vultures, roadkill, 18-wheelers hauling pine, and, in the winter, enough snow to strand a traveler in his tracks. That’s what happens to Preacher. Preacher isn’t really a preacher—he goes by a nickname he picked up in high school. His actual beliefs about God—or anything else for that matter—are rather ambivalent. When his pick-up truck stalls on the snowy highway, he approaches a trailer home to ask to use the phone and interrupts a couple in the midst of a screaming match. The wife invites Preacher to stay for coffee while the man steps away to sneak some whiskey in the bathroom. The wife takes the opportunity to seduce Preacher, then tells him of her plan to murder her husband with the shotgun hanging above the fireplace. Fleeing the trailer and impending murder, Preacher visits another one nearby, where a woman cares for her sick husband and son. The very next day, after getting his truck fixed, Preacher wanders into the Eternal Truth of Jesus Christ on Calvary Church only to discover a joint funeral for the boy and his father. These are just the first of several strange encounters Preacher experiences driving up and down Highway 28 West. He also finds a pit-bull puppy and a dead man, takes a job at a boxing plant, fails to help two teenagers drowning in a pond, and witnesses a mass shooting at a high school pep rally.

The novel is formatted like a play: Preacher recounts his adventures as monologues delivered to a crowd of people, many of whom have heard aspects of the story from other sources. They shout out comments, observations, and critiques of Preacher’s storytelling ability (during the telling of the anecdote about the arguing couple, one crowd member shouts, upon learning of the shotgun, “Just shoot the damn thing!”). Some members of the crowd have distinct personalities, like Lizzie, the “Girl Poet in Crowd,” who offers cryptic verses now and again between Preacher’s speeches. The stories Preacher tells are hard to make sense of—they have the fluidity and ambiguity of religious allegory, and both Preacher and the crowd often have difficulty assessing their meaning; the format itself adds an additional layer of abstraction. Preacher sometimes tells his stories in the first person, sometimes in the third, and there’s a slipperiness to the time and setting. Fans of Samuel Beckett and other aggressively postmodern writers may enjoy picking apart the layers of Preacher’s dreamlike soliloquies, but most readers will probably be left baffled by this difficult-to-parse work.

An ominous, often alienating piece of experimental fiction set along a hellish highway.

In this debut fantasy, a man stumbles into an adventure and a potential romance in an otherworldly land.

University of Alabama computer programmer Billy Wise uses a sick day to explore his farmland. He’s armed with a machete in case he runs into a rattlesnake or copperhead and, indeed, spots an enormous snake. Recalling a cryptic riddle in a newspaper that cited rattlesnakes, he follows this reptile into an old clawfoot bathtub—right into a bizarre world of talking animals, a unicorn, and a beautiful woman named Soapy. There’s also the huge, surprisingly amiable snake called Bogus, who takes Billy into “The House,” a seemingly magical, labyrinthine place that defies logic. It can send people to such cities as medieval Canterbury, and a train ride (inside The House) is one way to move from room to room. But while Billy mingles with warmhearted individuals, like Soapy’s shape-shifting sister, Alexandra, it’s not an entirely benevolent world. Mr. and Mrs. Snelling trade off as administrators of The House. Now, it’s Mrs. Snelling’s turn, and she doesn’t want Lady Wisdom (who’s Soapy) interfering with her rule. So she kidnaps Soapy to send her somewhere far away—or to something worse. Billy may just be an “ordinary jerk” and divorced back in Tuscaloosa, but over here, he wields his machete like a sword for battling vicious clackers (creatures that resemble wild coat hangers). He, Bogus, and others search for Soapy in the unnavigable House and face off against the fearsome Snellings, who’ve been in charge for an impossibly long time.

For much of Taylor’s quirky book, readers will be as confused as Billy. The hero, for example, has no clue where he is and tends to go where others push him, even if it means applying for a mysterious job. But Billy’s perpetual uncertainty makes him a relatable protagonist in a world of unexplainable sights. His dialogue likewise teems with hesitant, vocalized pauses, leading some to believe his name is “Uh Billy.” Still, his fascination with and attraction to Soapy ostensibly drives him, while Bogus acts as a reliable guide. Notwithstanding the story’s surreal environment, the author’s descriptions paint a clear picture, from vines that “swayed overhead like endless clusters of mating snakes” to a cobweb-laden room of weathered furniture and a lamp “cast in the form of a nude woman balancing an amber globe atop her head.” This enjoyable fantasy is replete with comedy, much of which comes courtesy of Bogus, who undermines snake stereotypes. He’s a loyal reptile with an affinity for whiskey who delivers often absurd “Bogus Dictums.” “Each and every animal,” he tells Billy, “is sad after sex.” On the other hand, the Snellings are an unnerving duo; they have power that likely can’t be measured and, most disturbingly, remind everyone of a specific someone they know. That’s not unlike gods, but Taylor retains a sense of ambiguity surrounding characters and origins until making a more overt theological connection later in the novel. While the story has a distinct resolution, there are threads left for a sequel, such as a character who inexplicably vanishes.

A delightfully peculiar and dreamlike tale with a playful, indelible cast.

A forensic anthropologist encounters a series of complicated interconnections in this novel.

Dr. Clarissa Circle, an English major–turned–forensic anthropologist, has a mantra: “No one ever touches anyone.” She insists on it as her guiding principle, but it’s often questioned by other characters and tested by events, which connect to one another in numerous ways. In 1999, at age 32, Clarissa begins her first postdoctoral job as a new professor at the University of Kentucky. When a “puzzling glut of ritual murders” occurs in the area, Clarissa becomes a consultant to the Lexington police. She and Sgt. Willy Cox begin a relationship that’s later rocked by mutual infidelities and jealousies. Clarissa analyzes skeletons found in a mass grave, which could relate to a rumored “blood cult” from the early 1970s. These rumors are confirmed by Methuselah, a former hippie who attended the university in that era. In a local forest shack, two dead bodies are discovered that have been there for a considerable length of time—an apparent double suicide. Meanwhile, a mentally ill man stalks a female student; another woman lives in his boardinghouse whom Clarissa dubs “Petite Artiste,” as she often stands outside and sketches Clarissa’s rented house—the same house where a woman whose body was found at the mass gravesite used to live. Another female boarder is romantically obsessed with the artist and secretly follows her. At the same time, three English students share a house—seemingly a separate story, yet their lives have points of connection with other characters, too. And an old man becomes a Lexington street-corner prophet, his stream of phrases taken as oracular by growing crowds. As these various mysteries and relationships unfold, are solved, remain obscure, or end in violence or romance, characters consider the nature of chance and patterns. Along the way, Taylor (Pineapple, 2017, etc.) tells an entertainingly complicated, interwoven story that is, by turns, funny, horrifying, and tender. Philosophy, physics, literature, and historical events, such as the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath, all play roles, making this a novel of ideas as well as a complex murder mystery. One of its chief ideas is the question of how much people actually contribute to pattern-making rather than simply perceiving it. At one point, for instance, Methuselah, in a spot that was once occupied by a Civil War monument, comments on the “fermenting connection among a renegade Confederate general, his stallion, a methhead, and a hoary-haired gent babbling unrelated babbles. Obviously, my friend Willy the dashing detective was getting to me with his Jungian synchronicities.” Different narrators, each with his or her own style, swap around storytelling duties, providing checks on different points of view as well as skillful revelations of character. It is somewhat disappointing when it’s revealed that a key to Clarissa’s character is repressed childhood trauma, which feels like an overused plot device. However, this is a relative quibble among so much inventive brio.

An intelligent, deeply felt, quirky, and original novel that lives up to its ambitions.

Taylor’s (Pineapple, 2017, etc.) collection of linked short stories features a recurring protagonist who has a series of spooky encounters.

Kentucky is evidently a hub for spirit activity. At least, that seems to be the case for this book’s narrator, whose real name no character ever utters. In the opening tale, “Galen’s Mountain Child,” he’s only 10 years old when he and his older friend Galen search for a ghost that appears to be periodically calling out for help. In “Hey-hello/hey-goodbye/hey-weep-no-more,” Galen warns the teenage narrator of two high schoolers who had a fatal car accident about 20 years ago on prom night. Since then, 13 kids have died in similar accidents in that same allegedly wraith-cursed spot. The entries in this collection are chronological, unfolding during the 1960s and ’70s. The narrator eventually attends the University of Kentucky and works at the campus bookstore. While at UK, he sees apparitions in the stories “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” and “Louie, Louie and the Blonde Hippie”; in the latter tale, he has the chance to thwart a potential serial killer. Not every story, however, has a ghost. In “Angel’s Wings,” the narrator hears voices on his staticky crystal radio, including Galen’s, who’s currently away in the Navy. Likewise, “Faithful Companion” is a humorous tale of his blind date, which heats up at a dentist’s office after hours. But the comedy is gleefully dark: When the dentist unexpectedly shows up, the narrator must hide in a closet—with a skeleton. Taylor primarily takes the traditional route with his horrorcentric tales. One of the collection’s tales, “The Perfect Ghost Story, Plus One,” addresses narrative tropes in ghost stories. A character lists conventions in a tale she relates to the narrator: “Mine is a legitimate ghost story, complete with doll motif, haunted house…mood, moral, warnings, turning point, and climax.” The author’s book is likewise filled with familiar horror imagery: There’s a string of creepy dolls in “I Am the Egg,” and the narrator investigates a haunted house in “Ms. Sylvia’s Home Cure.” There is, however, occasional repetition, such as several characters’ dying in car wrecks and the narrator’s experiencing plot-turning visions (often of someone who’s dead). But Taylor excels at establishing unnerving moods: At a séance in “Tacete,” the narrator recounts, “The hairs on my neck and forearm did a tiny dance. It was as if a gentle overhead air-conditioning had just started up.” The author’s greatest triumph is his protagonist. Even nameless, the narrator is distinctive. Readers, over the course of the stories, watch him move from a Catholic boarding school to college and endure such adolescent woes as his persistent virginity. Galen is equally diverting: Though his relationships with women rarely last, he has a soft spot for Louie, Louie, the Labrador mix he adopts. Throughout, Taylor has fun avoiding the narrator’s moniker: hobby-shop owner Max Howard of “I am the Egg” sifts through a handful of incorrect names while Sylvia simply calls him Bookstore.

Unabashedly conventional horror tales with an understated but remarkable lead character.

A New Mexico spy and her friends stumble upon a murderous plan involving a dangerous new weapon in Taylor’s (Let There Be Lite, 2014, etc.) novel in verse.

Taylor’s unique novel, written almost entirely in rhyming poetry, is largely narrated by a character also named Joe Taylor (more affectionately known as Our Beloved Writer). His muse, Trixie, aka “Dixie” or “Pixie,” reads his pages and offers up effervescent, sexually charged critiques. His story is about four friends, their families, and associates in Los Alamos, New Mexico (“the town that spawned the atom bomb”). Dockworker Hank Riser has just bought a new, two-story rancho, and he’s anxious for his girlfriend, Carmen Brown, to move in. Hank has an inkling that she’s a spy; as it happens, she’s investigating a cartel that deals in science instead of drugs. Somehow, the tech for a new weapon, the “G-string gun,” has been stolen by the cartel and is being used to kill off young women. Along with friends Dave McDowell and Lorrie Taylor, Carmen and Hank aim to crack the case, helped along by a wacky “Morguemeister” and his medical examiner/assistant. Some shady characters drop off tickets to a performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Otello in Santa Fe, which may hold the key to solving the case. Taylor’s story in rhyme is definitely an adventurous narrative in terms of structure and style, although it works best when the action is more grounded. Joe’s scenes with Trixie are the most helpful for understanding a narrative that’s a bit of a riddle. Carmen is an intriguing character, tough and determined, though she feels underdeveloped, as chapters sometimes end in a cursory manner (“No sense in ending this chapt. with a turd”) before they make complete sense. The playfully vulgar and sometimes-witty story does have a plot, but it’s often buried under tangents, asides, and extraneous dialogue. Acronyms and abbreviations for characters’ names also tend to be confusing; the helpful character list at the end should have been placed at the beginning.

An ambitious novel whose frantic pace and quixotic nature obscure its plot.

The FBI discovers millions of illicit election ballots for a presidential candidate in a woman’s car in this political satire.

In Sumter County, Alabama, the FBI finds—apparently while changing the tire of a woman’s car—about 7 million ballots cast for Joe Biden as well as 11 books of first-class stamps adorned with portraits of Elvis Presley. The car is named—it’s a Nissan Altima—in reports, but the owner of the car is not, referred to repeatedly as the “Alleged Woman” in Taylor’s madcap tale. The “Bogus Biden Ballot case” quickly becomes a national media sensation, and the relevant authorities become obsessed with the microscopically insignificant counting and recounting of the massive dump of ballots to determine an exact quantity. New York lawyer Rudy Gullibilliani—this revision of Rudy Giuliani’s name is an example of the author’s vaudevillian humor—enters the fray, first to investigate electoral fraud but later to represent the Alleged Woman. Rudy is worried President Trumpet will go bankrupt, leaving the attorney high and dry. The Centers for Disease Control, led by Herman “Hiccup” Healthman, orders the quarantining of the ballots on the grounds that they may be infected with Covid-19. As a result, the Proud Bananas, a national political organization skeptical of the virus, offers to step in: “We may just ride down to Alabama and eat them, just to prove how silly this pandemic stuff is. I mean, haven’t you had a teeny cold before? Did you go crying to a senator and stuffing masks down everyone’s throats when you did?”

The story’s premise is thought-provoking and amusing. And one can credit Taylor with the literary virtue of consistency—the farcical tone of the book never abates, not even for the length of a dependent clause. But the brief novel—under 150 pages—feels considerably longer, an often bumpy read. The entire work is presented as a series of breathless press releases written in an absurdist style and sometimes feels like a catalog of Dad stories, more goofy than clever, let alone raucously funny. One can’t help but feel a sense of familiarity while reading the tale. Consider this caricature of Donald Trump: “This is goo for America, this is goo for freedom. It will keep America Great. Some things have been accomplished, some very goo things, very goo. And I’m going to take this special occasion to tell you that I’m a very goo loser. A very goo one. I understand a lot. People are amazed that I’m not a psychiatrist.” One can argue, in the author’s defense, that he chose a forbidding genre—during genuinely surreal times, it isn’t easy to top the parody that reality provides. While there are some humorous passages in these pages, Taylor ultimately offers readers a compilation of silly jokes half-heartedly crammed into something that looks like a novel at first glance but upon closer scrutiny is a litany of one-liners.

An intriguing but uneven ballot tale.