"Hackle may be the best absurdist story writer working today."-Bradley Sands, author of TV Snorted My BrainWithin the whacked-out worlds of these twisted tales, only one thing remains the same:Everything is better when laced with the tears of a clown...When a sexually adventurous couple decides to spice things up by bringing bees into the mix, they learn it's never wise to dial 811 in case of an emergency. A deadbeat dad gains employment as a lady-in-waiting in a fairytale bromance where every character looks exactly like someone else from John Carpenter's The Thing. The unknowing victim of a cruel prank, a simpleton spends his entire life waiting on a park bench for the hottest girl in school. Using only his twenty-sided die and good old-fashioned D&D magic, a man must continually resurrect the neighborhood kid regularly murdered on his own front lawn. An aging slaughterhouse worker and the iconic figure from Edvard Munch's The Scream hit the clubs every weekend in a vain attempt to get laid.These and many more absurdities await in Clown Tear Junkies, the debut collection from Douglas Hackle.

Bro, do you even know what happens if you stand in front of a mirror and say “Blockbuster Video” exactly one million times? No, bro? Well, don’t feel bad, because neither did newly rich Tim Carmichael-Wellingtonshire, a man obsessed with becoming the inbred banjo boy from the movie Deliverance. That is, he didn’t know until he moved into the original “Dueling Banjoes” house in the blue hills of northern Georgia, a place indeed haunted by the ghost of Blockbuster Video, as murderous as he is obnoxious. But with the support of his brand-new kidney butler—obviously, a kidney butler is a butler made from one’s own surgically removed kidney (bro, did you even know that?)—Tim can deal with the ghost and focus on learning how to play the goddang banjo.