Delaying adulthood has never been so fun, or so anarchic, as it is in Tacky Goblin by T. Sean Steele. This novella in diary form is as pointed as a knife and as surreal as an Escher print.
The narrator, a fictional T. Sean, lived at his parent's house until recently. When a mold stain in his bedroom ceiling starts giving him mixed messages, he moves to Los Angeles to stay with his sister Kim. She gives him a human skull as a welcome gift ("Look, it's a gift! Take it or don't.") and sets about to counter his almost pathological resistance to activity. He's sure that his legs are atrophying, though, even though they look normal, so how can he look for a job? He knows that he should explore his new city, too, but the pills that his kind-of girlfriend, Laurie, gives him make his "brain feel carbonated." He winds up staying inside for days, fishing teeth out of the drains and training their new dog that looks and acts suspiciously like a human baby.
T. Sean's journal jumps and loops within time and space, and life doesn't so much happen to him as it happens around him. "The facts existed, or they didn't, whether or not I paid attention to them." His observations on life, and the rules of adulthood, are morbidly funny and ring with an oddball truth that fans of Welcome to Night Vale and Alice Isn't Dead will relish. --Cindy Pauldine, bookseller, the river's end bookstore, Oswego, N.Y.