An enthralling, epic tale of the webs of misinformation that saturate, obscure, and complicate the vagaries of day-to-day life in modern America. It’s 2006, and a cloud of darkness seems to have descended over the Earth—or at least over the minds of a ragtag assortment of Bay Area writers, drug dealers, social workers, porn directors, and Melvin, a street kid and refugee from his Mormon family. A shooter runs amok in an Amish schoolhouse, the president runs amok in the Middle East, a child is kidnapped from Disneyland, and on the local literary scene, a former child prostitute and wunderkind author that nobody has ever met has become a media sensation. But something is fishy about this author, Huey Beauregard, and so Melvin and his friends Felicia and Philip launch an investigation into the webs of self-serving stories, lies, rumors, and propaganda that have come to constitute our sad, fractured reality. Glory Hole is a novel about the ravages of time and the varied consequences of a romantic attitude toward literature and life. It is about AIDS, meth, porn, fake biographies, street outreach, the study of Arabic verb forms, Polish transgender modernists, obsession, and future life forms. It’s about getting lost in the fog, about prison as both metaphor and reality, madness, evil clowns, and mystical texts. Vast and ambitious, comic and tragic, the novel also serves as a version of the I Ching , meaning it can be used as an oracle. “ Glory Hole is a capacious, sinuous, complex book that pursues the interlinked stories of characters on the margins of social classes, conventions, and sexual/gender structures in ways that reveal the authentic, everyday fabric of their lives.” —Matthew Roberson, author of Impotent and List “ Glory Hole is a novel that provides the glories of story with none of its limitations. Offering all the sensemaking forms of narrative without ever coalescing into any one binding tale, it is a gorgeous, shape-shifting trapdoor into the void, the only true home you’ve ever really known.” —Elisabeth Sheffield, author of Helen Keller Really Lived , Gone , and Fort Da Stephen Beachy is the author of the novels boneyard , Distortion , and The Whistling Song and the twin novellas Some Phantom/No Time Flat . He is also the author of Zeke Yoder vs. the Singularity , the first in a series of Amish sci-fi novels. He is the prose editor of the journal Your Impossible Voice , teaches in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco, and lives in San Diego. Glory Hole By Stephen Beachy The University of Alabama Press Copyright © 2017 Stephen Beachy All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-57366-062-4 CHAPTER 1 Once, Philip got off the bus in a Montana town perched above the flatlands he'd just passed through. In the far distance, black and purple rain clouds had been pasted into the otherwise empty sky. The vapor trails hung down like chromosomes. This all happened a long time ago and nobody knows it. Might as well have dreamed it. Once, Philip had a crush on a crazy. Roger, the crazy, was in love with Madonna, and had mailed her furniture, naked photos of himself, and dog shit once, and then, to apologize, he'd mailed her his thirty-page proof of the existence of God. He'd mixed words and numbers together with boisterous squiggles and indecipherable equations, all purporting to demonstrate an irrefutable divine truth: time and death, it all added up. Roger believed Madonna was into him, too, or that she was, at least, keeping tabs on him, sending her spies over Big Sur in airplanes and helicopters, and communicating with him through songs on the radio. Roger was handsome, with that childish magnetism that insane people sometimes have. Philip and Roger had both ended up in Big Sur because they'd been down to almost nothing. Separately, passing through, they'd seen the Help Wanted sign at the gas station. Roger had hit bottom in Oregon, living in a cabin in the woods and eating dog food, and was heading south toward LA to confront Madonna once and for all. Philip wasn't headed anywhere in particular at the time. Now, Philip heads out the side door of his cottage, down the stairs to the basement. The past — it never goes away, until eventually it does. The world is full of different humans now, different sorts of thoughts, differently configured brains. The changes wrought on consciousness by volcanoes, by misinformation, by moving images and dark underground spaces ... Philip should have ducked into the basement, and he almost always remembers, but not today. The sound of his head colliding with the doorframe is shockingly loud. The pain is disorienting. He presses his fingers against the gummy blood clotting in his hair, and now here he is. Down below, dizzy and bleeding. Down below, there are unopened boxes full of the books and artwork that Raymond's father left them when he died. The basement is unfinished, with naked Sheet rock and pink insulation shoved