Outré

In a future where cinema has usurped reality and there’s nothing special about effects, an aging movie star takes on the role of a lifetime, growing the flesh of an otherworldly kaiju onto his body. At the same time, all of the roles he has played in the past fight for control of his psyche and identity as agents of the media prey upon him. The result is alcoholism, ultraviolence, psychosis . . . and the promise of eternal life. Combining the aesthetics of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, and D. Harlan Wilson’s own experiences as a model, stuntman, standup comic, and stiltwalker, Outré satirizes the contemporary mediascape while depicting a world in which schizophrenia has become a normative condition. Like his revolutionary biographies of Adolf Hitler, Sigmund Freud, and Frederick Douglass, the novel is written in Wilson’s signature “Hörnblowér” prose and reaffirms the critical consensus that he is a genre unto himself.