What I'm Reading

If this guy's considered "the poet laureate of Gen X," then I'd like to be the rep for Gen Y.

I purchased the 2008 reissue of this novel back in March of last year at a Seattle bookshop. The cover was different from the one shown here, and I was guilty of having judged it so quickly. The stark white, titleless front featured a heavily pixelated Nintendo-like character of a comatose patient with a red heart hovering in the top corner. Intriguing. I turned it over and found the title on the spine.

The synopsis had me hooked: On a snowy Friday night in 1979, just hours after making love for the first time, Richard's girlfriend, high school senior Karen Ann McNeil, falls into a coma. Nine months later she gives birth to their daughter, Megan. As Karen sleeps through the next seventeen years, Richard and their circle of friends reside in an emotional purgatory, passing through a variety of careers — modeling, film special effects, medicine, demolition — before finally reuniting on a conspiracy-driven supernatural television series. But real life grows as surreal as their TV show as Richard and his friends await Karen's reawakening...and the subsequent apocalypse.

Dum, dum, duuuuummmm!

Currently on page 33.

H.P.M.