Dermaphoria

By Craig Clevenger

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Aug 13, 2010
• ISBN: 9780385672368

Craig Clevenger

Craig Clevenger was born in Dallas, Texas and raised in Southern California, where he studied English at California State University, Long Beach. He has travelled extensively and lived in Dublin and London, but currently resides in California where he is at work on his second novel, Dermaphoria.

Reviews for Dermaphoria

[birksland · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wow! A very powerful book that starts off very strangely. I was drawn into the fact that I couldn't tell what was drug-induced fantasy by the main character and what was "reality." I've never read anything quite like this, a real change-of-pace book.

[9sunny9 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'd probably give it a 4.5 if I could. But I can't, so a 4 will have to do. The way it is told--structure, language--is what makes this book, as much as any elements of characterization or plotting, I think. The whole amnesia thing may be something of a cliche, but in this case it made sense, considering the circumstances; and it also allowed for a neat story-within-story structure (and I must admit, I love that kind of thing), episodes of the narrator's recent past interspersed with his present as he tries to recover his memories and piece together from them the events leading up to his current predicament. The revelation which comes to him with the final fragment of memory is a pretty great twist, though it doesn't exactly come out of the blue--but throughout this book, past and present intersect, so that everything seems to come full circle, in a way, at the very end--the ending is what nearly pushed this book to 5 stars, I think. A good read--short and sweet. (Which was nice, as I've been slogging through a whole mess of wonderful but lengthy books for quite some time now--it feels so great to finish a book within a day or two of starting it, rather than weeks or months!)

[jwarren42 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Read it because Chuck Palahniuk said it was the best book he'd read in the last few years. He wasn't wrong. The prose is powerful and twisting, the best kind of concrete poetry. Eric is one of the most interesting unreliable narrators I've met in a while. Don't listen to most of the low-ratings reviews: the fragmentation of the narrative isn't in the way of the story--the fragmentation IS the story. Also boasts one of the best last chapters I've ever read. HIGHLY recommended.