Lonely Men Club

by Mike Kleine, Ken Sparling (Foreword), John Trefry (Afterword)

Je suis devenu un magicien noir.

A 100,000 word computer generated novel about a time-traveling manifestation of the Zodiac Killer created for the Inside the Castle "Castle Freak Residency" over a period of 5 days in November 2017.

720 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2018

About the author

Mike Kleine is an author who grew up in West Africa. He currently resides in the American Midwest.

Reviews

[Kirk]

I "read" this book.

I did not read every single word in the book.

There are passages in the book that suggest it isn't meant to be read in that manner. There are passages split between two pages with words missing. Passages with sections blacked out. Passages white spaced with just periods. So you aren't going to read the entire manuscript anyway, even if you wanted to. Unless you try some of the techniques I mention below. You may be able to anticipate or find a repeating micro-narrative that fills in the gaps of a section blacked out.

Anyway:

As you can deduce from what I write above, the book provides a key to several methods by which you might read this book. There are a lot of different ways to read this. For this reason, I have to prefigure my review by talking about how I read the book.

I read every word up to about page 205 or so. (I recommend everyone read at least 100-200 pages of the book to get a sense of how the book is structured and to find repeating patterns). At that point, I noticed there was a series of recurring micro-narratives. These narratives evolved throughout the course of reading, but they generally started the same. They might begin with:

1. I brutalized . . .

2. Had a dream . . . (I may be paraphrasing here)

and there were many, many more.

Given the fact that many of these micro-narratives start with the same opening phrase, one way a reader could potentially read this book would be by processing the book in a computational linguistics program, and then searching for every instance of a given phrase. If you searched for "I brutalized" you could see how this micro-narrative evolves throughout the book separate of all of the other micro narratives it is surrounded by.

This would be an interesting approach.

I had a print version of this book, so I didn't have the luxury of using a corpus linguistics program, and I remember that the one I have from grad school couldn't deal with a manuscript this size anyway, most likely. I would have had to copy/paste smaller chunks into it and the compile the micro-narratives.

So I relied on memory.

What I noticed was this:

The micro narratives are arranged in paragraphs. Each sentence is a micro-narrative unto itself. Sometimes micro-narratives might take up two sentences.

Most of the micro-narratives appear in each paragraph. Sometimes they repeat. The protagonist may indicate he's had a dream, and that is was a bad one. This micro-narrative might appear every five pages, and you might rarely, if ever, see that micro-narrative evolve or change.

These micro-narratives, I have to assume, remain relatively static to highlight the ones that do change.

They also highlight the second method by which the micro narratives change. They change in the order in which they are organized. I'm not sure if this holds any significance.

So what about the micro-narratives that do change? Different people dying. Different reactions to static actions. What of those?

There is a degree of evolution in those micro-narratives. Is it indicative of character development or growth? Yes.

But man, it is such a strange way of going about reaching a sense of narrative without adhering to narrative conventions.

That's the point of experimental fiction though. It challenges you, and this book can be challenging.

I think of it like a piece of abstract art. Because it deviates from narrative conventions-at least many narrative conventions-it challenges you to make sense of the book however your faculties allow. For me it was, "boy, computational linguistics would really help break these paragraphs into micro-narratives so I could have a better sense of how they evolve individually."

Another thought was, "man, I want to check out all of the coordinates in this book on Google earth."

I have yet to do that.

The book can be read in a multitude of ways. It is best read broken down into smaller units to be digested.

So after page 205 I continued primarily by following the micro-narratives I was interested in. I'd skim the pages to see how the character's dreams impacted them, how many people they killed, what the sky said, some other ones that were particularly interesting to me.

Then around page 400 or so I just read the pages that were structured or organized differently. If the micro-narratives I was interested in fell on those pages. Awesome. If not, well, most of the time there was some micro-narrative I was familiar with, so that was cool with me too.

The book gets increasingly abstract as you move forward, and one feature I really enjoyed (in addition to the aesthetic) was the compound words Mike came up with in this one. Some of those were incredibly beautiful, and I found myself thinking, "man I want to use this word combo in a future book."

The arrangement is great, and the different font sizes-though the author says this was inadvertent-really kept me going. Even when things seemed repetitive linguistically, aesthetically the changes kept me going.

Then the book was done.

I spent a total of probably 3-4 hours with the book.

I may return to it to check out those coordinates. I highlighted those so I could go back to them.

And some day, if I manage to get my hands on a .txt version I can copy/paste from then I may plug it into my old program from grad school (piece by piece) to isolate some of the micro-narratives.

Ultimately, the book reminded me of life itself. When my father's uncle passed away, he had a "journal" that was just like this. I remember my dad showing it to me. I was excited at first because I thought it would feature reflections on life. But it really boiled down to: Sky clear. Cut wood for winter. Saw a deer. Warmer than usual today.

I found the journal a bit anti-climactic. This is what life boils down to? I thought.

In Lonely Men Club you see the protagonist writing in a similar fashion. However, you also get these moments of introspection. He contemplates suicide in different locales, in different fashions. He also thinks, "is this it?"

Also, the mundane is abruptly interrupted with lines like "Brutalized a foreign woman in Ohio." These abrupt, disturbing revelations are glossed over without thought, as they might be for a sociopath. Killing someone is just as significant an event as brushing one's teeth. There's something unnerving about that.

I really enjoyed this book. It got me thinking outside the box. I heard a fellow online a while ago asserting that experimental fiction these days is somewhat silly because writers are diving into it too early in their careers and they need to learn conventional craft BEFORE writing experimental fiction. I have to disagree. Mike's work has been experimental in different ways from the start, and he's becoming a master not of THE craft, but of HIS craft. There's something really admirable about that.

If you're in for a book of puzzles-the parameters of which you have to deduce on your own at times (which can be both liberating and confounding)-then I recommend this book 100%.

[Zadignose]

This is a far-out, provocative, and very-definitely-experimental book-object. I was pleased to see that it is consistent with the author's voice and expressed interests, as seen in his earlier works, even though it's something rather different in form and design. If cyclical, hypnotic, noisy, and intermittently surprising were the goals: mission accomplished.

I don't want to "spoil" the book by talking too much about its contents. Not that I could spill it's 100,000 words all into one brief review. Realize in advance that there will be more permutation and redundancy than even what one would expect from a Beckett, for instance. A computer was involved. Some design and some pure chance will present the reader with some striking images/thoughts/language-things at various junctures. I used a magnifying glass to read, at times, as necessary.

The book does not necessarily expect the reader to read it in its entirety, and it certainly does not assist the reader in doing so. In fact, at times it is partially redacted, or at least obscured, as design renders passages illegible or scatters them into fragments. There are cryptic surprises to be found within. At one point, I believed that random parts of words and letters had been blanked out to white on a page. Looking back to that page on another day, viewing the page from a greater distance, I saw what could not be seen on close inspection: the blanked out letters, combined with the naturally occurring white space around them, formed a partially legible white mask spelling out an address. I have no intention of going to that address! Zodiac might disembowel me!

Various readers will approach this book in various ways, not all of which will involve pulling out a magnifying glass to find out what the dude/dudette prayed for, and to which god, in this iteration. One may find oneself in more of a random-access approach. Choose your own bookventure.

If you haven't read Mike Kleine yet, you may start with this book, or you may start elsewhere, but you ought to start somewhere. You might find yourself looking back thirty years from now, asking, "How did I miss this?" while Mike looks down and laughs at you from his literary throne.

[Mike Kleine · Rating 5 out of 5]

These days, we have e-books and audio books and physical texts. Process is just as important as the end result. Mostly though, you will find that process is abandoned or forgotten once result has been achieved. Lonely ​Men ​Club is 99% process and 1% result, which is just as important as the book itself. I expect Lonely ​Men ​Club to be mistaken for poetry. Some may even believe it is a work of nonfiction or—much like the works of literature I admire most and continue to study—deemed unclassifiable. I want the reader to be in a trance. I want this sort of hypnosis effect to manifest itself as the reader continues to read the novel. Simply put, history repeats itself, over and over and over again. Nothing is new. Everything is old. Everything we think is new has already happened once before. Lonely ​Men ​Club is all about that. It embraces this ideal—this concept. And in the end, I can only hope a conversation naturally forms and continues to exist, long after the experience of Lonely ​Men ​Club is complete.

[Josiah Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Note: I have only read this book in the free PDF format provided by Inside the Castle during lockdown. It is an immediate, and pressing priority for me to purchase this book the moment shipping routes within NZ open back up and I have some spare funds. It is compulsive and demented and regenerative and entirely upended any preconceived notions I had of Kleine or of the press or of writing in general. Excellent, transformative stuff, into regression.

[Joe Bielecki · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book worth reading. The character of Zodiac is built in a way that you might not expect, but it makes sense. I read Lonely Men Club as a sort of journal/inner monologue of the Zodiac character and in doing so found a character that fits right in to the universe of Mike Kleine.

A book written mostly by a computer raises a lot of questions about how we should read the book. Should I read it the way I know to read books? The way Kleine suggests? Should I ask the computer? Should I tear the book apart to get at the characters that have been formatted into the gutters? Should I look at the book as simply a physical object? Or do I take what I have been given, read what I can, and use what is there and build a story based on all the information?

I did the last bit.

I did the last bit because I can't just read a book as a collection of characters. Even if there isn't a narrative, I always have to find some sort of Story. What the Story is, or what Story means will vary to fit what I have been given by the book and what I know of the author and so on.

The Story that comes out of Lonely Men Club is about some fourth dimensional creature that obsessively sends poems to people and fucks people in midlife and kills/assaults/brutalizes people in the Midwest, and is constantly thinking about suicide. That is a Story that I am interested in, and so I loved reading the book.

You can look at this book as a fun experiment, you can look at it as pretentious nothing, you can look at it as predicting the future of human/computer relations in art, you can look at it as the think that finally drove Mike Kleine insane. Or you can find a story with what you have been given and try to relate to it. Which as far as I'm concerned, makes this book just like any other book, only above average in quality.

[John Trefry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am looking for the vague thread of literature. The labyrinth is a reactionary transparency in text that is connected to mid-19th century “innovations” of literature that to this day continue to scour at the opacity of literature’s original project: indulgence in the possibility of text. Literature’s richness is in its emptiness, the structural hollowness in the picaresque of Cervantes and Sterne that gives over the entire being of a book to the thickness of its language, not the fidelity of its momentum. And through the iterative and uncertain quality of Lonely Men Club’s computational origins, it is a lovingly reinvigorated model for the picaresque.

[Jason Kane · Rating 5 out of 5]

So taken with this terrific text slab. Did I read every word? No—you kind of make excursions into the text, a lonely astronaut, experiencing, studying, marveling, bringing back to earth little samples of poetry that have big big consequences.

[Ben Arzate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full review here.

Lonely Men Club is a radical book, even by the standards of experimental fiction. A lot of people will be very quickly turned off by it. However, Kleine has created an unquestionably unique book and a piece of text that works as piece of visual art as well. As of writing this, the publisher has this available for free as an e-book on their website. However, I very much encourage anyone interested in this to get the physical book as it loses something without being an object one can hold and flip through.

[Johnny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mike Kleine writes books that walk you through an almost impossibly mundane landscape peppered with sudden, extreme, hyper-focused rays of incomprehensible death⁠, loss, destruction via existence in this specific universe—like pinching a nerve while turning your head to check for traffic on a street you know is empty, or picking up a frayed wire while recollecting your computer charger at the end of a Tuesday work day, or seeing a man step funny off a stair at the library and compound fracture his tibia straight through his pant leg.

Generally he writes like that: however, this book is full blast sticking your head into the stream, as if you could somehow convert your mind to tune into the everything. Reading this feels like: chewing on home insulation, listening to ASMR on blown speakers, being on twitter for 16 hours, standing still in a crowded tunnel with the end and beginning in sight but very far away and surrounded by conversation.

This is a computer generated novel, so Mike Kleine has given up a bit of agency: I know that the prologue would argue differently, but he has. He has set the parameters, and let the tool run. Yes, he is in charge of the object at the end, along with whatever other Castle Freaks were involved in the making of this, but he has allowed the physics of (what is to us) chance take charge of the words. A book is an object, but an object second to the words within.

And so the stream of hyperinformation is right for this: maybe we used to be immune to it, or maybe we used to be limited to imagining it only as far as our senses could take us. Anything beyond was pure conjecture. But now, no, not so much: I can open endless tabs. I can set every device in my house to stream some other podcast. I can go to Target and max out my two credit cards on who knows what and bury myself in the sound, or in the text, or in the video, or in the all of it.

LONELY MEN CLUB is that tower of TVs at the Tate, but stuck inside the space and time travelling Zodiac like the artificial heart in Crank: High Voltage, but we are in it, and nothing broadcasts, there is no broadcast, it is only the everything ever blasting. And we are still, ever receiving, but still.

[Bob Comparda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Too repetitive for me, but still had me hooked. 700 pages of the same sentences/ideas/thoughts constantly reshuffling with the details slightly changing. From the obsessive compulsive perspective of the zodiac killer, which somewhat explains the insanity. Like being inside the head of a crazy person and hearing every thought. Anything this lacks in story it makes up for in format and style. You're probably not going to read every word, but you're going to look at every page. My favorite part was the QR code at the end 😂

[Brooks Sterritt · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Wrote a short story and titled it superBlack Darkness II and sent it to Dave Toschi."