Find The Last Projector Curated By David James Keaton File
not sure how to talk about this book, Ill be honest and say up front that the whole point of this book seems to be to fck with the readers head, And it does that in spades,
I had a hate/gotta see what happens relationship throughout my read, No matter how frustrating it was I kept coming back to it, I couldnt just put it away,
And, it really messed with my dreams which Im taking to mean that there was a lot of processing going on as I slept.
Can I recommend this book I honestly dont know, If you are willing to work and are okay with no closure it might be for you, In this hysterical fever dream of a novel, meet an unhinged paramedic turned porn director uprooted from an evershifting 's fantasy, Discover a crime that circles back through time to a farreaching coverup in the back of an ambulance, Reveal a manic tattoo obsession and how it conspires to ruin the integrity of a film and corrupt identity itself, Unravel the mystery surrounding three generations of women and the one secret they share, And follow two amateur terrorists, whose unlikely love story rushes headlong toward a drivein apocalypse, Surreal, narratively slippery crime fiction, like a temporallyloose INLAND EMPIRE with an bleakly humorous strain contained within it I got this book by GoodReads giveaways in exchange for an honest review.
I don't really know what to think about this book, It made me think of things an old friend told me when he was on an acid trip, If I had wrote down all his trip stories and glued them together with psychedelic glue, it could have given this story, lolll
Sometimes, this novel is it a novel made me think of J, G. Ballard's novel titled sitelinkCrash, sometimes it felt like that movie in which the MCs were caught in a strange video game virtual reality and never knowing if they were still in the game or not anymore.
I felt a little like
them while reading this book,
I went on reading it because I felt forced to try to find some clues on where the fck this story is going
So either it's a great novel, or it's madness.
But maybe it's both.
A TOP SHELF review, originally published in the January,edition of sitelinkThe Monitor
“Well, thats proof that youre just like that Bugs Bunny cartoon with that giant pencil just drawing shit around you as it goes, making it up on the spot.
”
“Huh”
“When you hear a deep cut that would never be on the radio, thats the writer up there, in the zone, cranking music in the background.
”
The Last Projector Broken River Booksis the first novel by David James Keaton, a prolific writer of short stories.
The sprawling yet evertwisting plot follows three basic narrative threads: Billy and Bully are a young Bonnie and Clyde sort of couple with a bizarre plan to strap a bomb to a police officer in order to free his Kpartner Larry is an aging and tattooobsessed director of pornography who in his free time is making a real film about an incident from his past using actors from his adult movies Jack is an EMT obsessed with the welfare of Jacki, who survived a car accident six years ago only to become the victim of a serial rapist with an insane multigenerational breeding plan.
The tricky thing is that these rambling, dialogueheavy stories intersect in ways that are on the surface impossible, violating not only storytelling mechanics but time itself.
Jacks story, for example, is being filmed by Larry as far as the many pop culture references indicate before it ever happened, and the revelation of the identity of Bully similarly defies logic.
Every time you think you can tell how the story is going to gel together and conclude, it shatters and reforms itself like some everevolving virus.
Keaton resists any traditional relationship between author and reader, deliberately unmooring the text from the hoary tools we use to extract meaning from a text.
The result is akin to Samuel Beckett on meth: a nervous, chatty absurd that forces us to confront a novel whose author is as unreliable or absent as God in an agnostic or atheistic universe.
"Youll either love it or hate it, Although, in my experience, if something is ever described as 'love it or hate it,' it is, without fail, fucking terrible, I've studied this phrase for a decade, and so far there have been no exceptions, " The Last Projector, page
Every blue moon you stumble across a book like no other, The Last Projector is one of those books, It was basically thrown into my face one day when I was raving about how good the movie "Under the Silver Lake" is on Twitter.
Someone replied to me saying how eerily similar The Last Projector and Under the Silver Lake are, I bought the book and started reading it immediately, At first I was lost, confused and wasn't sure if I liked the seediness of it, but all of that changed once I really got to the meat of the novel.
This book is like listening to the schizophrenic rantings of a man trying to recount a movie thats never existed, It's like House of Leaves meets Blue Velvet, I can't think of a better word to describe this book other than Lynchian, It serves as one of the darkest comedies I have ever had the pleasure of reading, It's like a movie but It isn't, This is a horrible, absurd nightmare of a story that only gets better with each chapter, It isnt until revelations are revealed toward the end, when we finally start to see through the eyes of the bat shit wackos we're following, when we really start to understand the story in its entirety.
Hear the entire review on our website: sitelink bookedpodcast. com/ This is going to be a polarizing novel, Some people will call it genius, others will burn crosses in front of David James Keaton's house and I could see multiple reasons why they would do so.
Point is, it'll be impossible for you to have weak feelings about THE LAST PROJECTOR,
The best way I can describe it is that it's a schizophrenic mystery, In a typical mystery, you're supposed to gather clues from the intrigue, but since David James Keaton is a mean bastard, he buried them within the very fabric of reality, and before you know it, you'll be doubting every line you read, going insane and smear the walls with your own poo.
Still, Keaton keeps it fun and goofy and it helps as much as it is a distraction from the quest that is this novel.
David James Keaton is like that strange cousin who keeps you awake forh straight, buzzing with energy, You love him, but you'd want him to go to bed sometimes, I grudgingly loved THE LAST PROJECTOR, but it's NOT for everybody, Only the strong will survive it, Let me sum this book up in six words: even the epilogues contain car crashes, David James Keaton's The Last Projector contains a villain who ejaculates into flytraps, a legion of doppelgangers making the world's worst art film, a rap song based on The Thing, and about a dozen fictional cars that I'd guess have their origins in the Grand Theft Auto seriesa repeated reference within the novel.
The Last Projector isn't really a traditional novel though, Like Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, it's more of a virtual reality simulation of what it's like to be David James Keaton or, at the very least, what it's like to be sucked into a conversation with David James Keaton.
The book is a terribly offensive romp that tangles as it untangles its violent mysteries, but the plot is really a springboard for Keaton to launch into one conversational riff after another.
His characters are obsessed with 's films, Evel Knievel, thumbwrestling, a Model T theme park ride, and songs about dogsalthough there surprisingly isn't a DMX reference until nearly the The Last Projector's endand you find yourself unnerved when they become your obsessions too.
Let me finish by reviewing the book on its own termsmovie references, David James Keaton's The Last Projector is the literary equivalent of the climax to Tin Cup, This is like the "cool" film nerd got a literary bug but also had to compulsively name drop every love and affectation they picked up.
It's fun!
Imagine the life of Sam Sylvia's Marc Maron from Glow life before wrestling, This is him making his artistic horror porn movies, And a bit of "Under the Silver Lake" but more interesting, This is maybe the wildest novel I've ever read, It's actually kind of difficult to talk about or review in any meaningful way, but I also think it's the best book to come out of indie lit maybe ever.
It's hilarious and difficult and endlessly enjoyable and readable, though you'll be squinting at the page trying to make sense of everything.
It's a book riddled with popculture unstuck from time and kind of tossed across decades, It's a book where characters become unglued from their identities and reality itself, but somehow this never strays from realism, It's firmly grounded in reality but also plays with that reality in some of the most interesting ways I've seen,
You'll probably get lost but it won't matter, Where you're going and where you came from also don't matter, Just keep reading because the words will guide you in all kinds of new directions, It's like an octopus sending tentacles out in every direction, grasping at what seems inconsequential or even nonsensical only to hit you in the face hours later with revelations that are both kind of absurd and eerily important.
Keaton's really done something else with this book, It's hard to articulate what he's doing, but managed to make a difficult novel so readable and fun and addictive while also making its own difficultness kind of selfconscious and not very important.
It's mesmerising.
The whole way the narrative works is insane and should not be replicated by anyone ever, but it absolutely works here by sheer force of Keaton's addictive and hilarious and insightful voice.
I don't really know what to say about it except that you should read it,
Yeah, I'm sticking with it:
This is the best book published by an independent small press,
It's also probably the most ambitious, .