Nut Jobs Author |best| -

There is a peculiar thrill in picking up a book that comes with a warning label. Not the staid, corporate sticker about explicit content, but the whispered, urgent caution of a friend: “You have to read this, but… the author is kind of a nut job.”

In the hushed, orderly halls of literary culture, the term “nut job” is an insult. In the smoky backrooms of cult fandom, it is a badge of honor. The Nut Jobs Author is the figure who has broken through the polite constraints of genre, sanity, and plausibility, dragging the reader into a labyrinth built from equal parts genius and delusion. They are the paranoid, the messianic, the fabulists who have come to believe their own metaphors. And literature is better—stranger, fiercer, more alive—because of them. nut jobs author

So raise a glass to the paranoid, the grandiose, the delusional, the obsessive. Raise a glass to the author who replied to your polite rejection email with a 10,000-word treatise on how you are a pawn of the psychic vampires. They are annoying, exhausting, and often wrong. There is a peculiar thrill in picking up

This is the most lovable archetype. The Holy Fool writes a 1,200-page sci-fi/fantasy/horror/romance epic in which the grammar is optional, the plot relies on the concept of “quantum feelings,” and the hero defeats the Dark Lord by crying really hard. Think before he invented Scientology—his Battlefield Earth is a masterpiece of delusional pacing and accidental comedy. Or think of the self-published sensation Vernon Sullivan (a pseudonym of Boris Vian, who pretended to be a black American author translating his own work from a non-existent English original). The Holy Fool believes they are writing the next Dune . They are writing a beautiful, insane, unreadable fever dream. And we are richer for it. The Nut Jobs Author is the figure who

But without them, we’d only have books that make sense. And who wants to live in a world that makes sense? J. S. Latham is a critic and recovering literary journalist. He owns a first edition of “The Atrocity Exhibition” and is currently 400 pages into a self-published novel about time-traveling bees.

The reader of the nut job author is an anthropologist of the extreme. We are looking for the boundary where belief becomes art and art becomes madness. We want to touch the electrified fence.

Literature needs its nut jobs. They are the prospectors who dig in the dangerous, collapsed mineshafts where the sane novelist fears to tread. Nine times out of ten, they find only fool’s gold—a 900-page screed about the gender of angels. But that tenth time? That tenth time, they bring back a piece of ore that glows with a strange, new light. They expand what a sentence can do, what a story can contain, what a mind can believe.