Written in 2007 by Craig Clevenger, Dermaphoria is the second novel from this talented and challenging US author. Having structured his first novel, The Contortionist’s Handbook, around a narrator whose memory was that of a savant, Clevenger chose ‘amnesia’ as his primary condition for this text.

                Eric Ashworth wakes to find trouble in the form of a police officer named Ansliger but without any recollection aside from the name “Desiree”.  At this point he is faced with the prospect of a prison sentence for being the architect of an increasingly popular new drug which is spreading virulently through the streets of Los Angeles.  

                In a frantic attempt to reconstruct the fragments and shards of his shattered memory, Ashworth begins using the hallucinogen he has created. As a consequence of this usage, he suffers a disorientation of his perceptions and awareness of the different realities generated by his impaired mind which causes a paranoid sensibility and addiction to achieve permanence in his consciousness.   

Clevenger’s written style has an unerring congruence with this novel’s subject matter, thematic concerns and structure. The deliberate layering and disordering of different narratives, scenarios, sequences and events contributes to the reader’s difficulty in establishing the actualities of the plot, producing an elegant, sophisticated and complex novel that remains compelling to the last. Boundaries of psyche, the liminal spaces of the mind and body, the ‘exactogen’ at the centre of this text synthesises human feelings and then forces and aggravates the transgression of boundaries both physical and mental through the hallucinations and the after-effects.

                In terms of influences, that this is reviewed favourably by both Irvine Welsh and Chuck Palahniuk offers some idea of the direction the author has taken yet this is only a précis of the menu from which he has undoubtedly dined. With an LA location and pages peppered with underworld slang and vernacular, this is the stuff noir is made of, the seamy and seedy criminalities at the forefront with a wily female on the lookout for her next make. Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves is offered as a seminal comparison and influence by Clevenger and I would point to the work of Ken Kesey as another fundament for this wonderful and highly ambitious novel that is executed with panache.