A trans-dimensional gateway beween a Kenny Rogers Roasters location in Seattle to a Fred Meyer in Alaska. Richard Nixon bowling with the Roswell aliens. A corn-worshipping cult on the outskirts of a My Little Pony theme park. These are some of the tales in The Failure Cascade, Jon Konrath’s latest collection of flash, micro-fiction, stories, and other weirdness. The Failure Cascade is thirty-four pieces of abnormal and unorthodox prose about the litanies and tribulations of the post-apocalyptic reality. The bite-sized chunks of sick, laugh-out-loud dark humor continue the madness within is collections Ranch: The Musical and Help Me Find My Car Keys And We Can Drive Out!, but also contain longer stories reminiscent of his work in Thunderbird and Sleep Has No Master.
The author of the cult classic Rumored to Exist weaves a chaotic collection of nonlinear references to death metal, pop culture, Nineties nostalgia, and the absurd into an ambient enumeration of the complexities and contraditions of current existence. It includes all previously unpublished stories, such as Hot Karl’s Goodbye and the Taliban Bugzilla Database, Post-dialectic Discourse in the Works of GG Allin and Alanis Morissette, Evel Knievel Would Never Call Me at Five in the Morning to Talk About Christian Black Metal, and Sewage Beach.
This is a fever dream of a collection of the amusing and unusual, almost designed to offend, enlighten, and entertain. Like the rest of Konrath’s work, it is a wild ride through the surreal and unconventional.