I've Got a Time Bomb

by Sybil Lamb

The year is 286. The city of Morteville has been flooded by a devastating hurricane but Sybil D'Lye has never been happier. She's making out with girls, squatting an abandoned mansion, and looting every pharmacy within wading distance. Everything's going swimmingly until the night Sybil is beaten with a pipe and left for dead. Though doctors are able to reconstruct her skull, her mind is altogether another matter. Thus begins her incredible and unbelievable journey, looking for love among the loners, losers, and leave-behinds in the forgotten corners of Amerika. Based on a true* story.
*Guaranteed minimum 88% true content by weight!

Genres: Fiction, Queer, LGBT, Transgender, Science Fiction, Novels, Disability

357 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 27, 2014

Reviews

[Cat · Rating 5 out of 5]

What do I even tell you? So, full disclosure, I was involved in making this book exist. BUT I did this for free. I put in hundreds of hours of unpaid work, and I basically did this because the last time I liked a book this much was when I was twelve and read Middlemarch. I feel like Middlemarch was my first hit of literature, and I spent twenty years reading compulsively, searching for something that would exhilarate me like that again, and got pretty close but never quite there, until I read this. This book is it. It is not like anything else. This is true because it is a book in which almost all the characters are trans women, but it is also true because no-one else can write like this. I do not know what Sybil Lamb is but she is a genius. If you like books even a little bit you should read this. Even if you don't like books you should make a exception. If you like romance, sci-fi, humour, literary fiction, fantasy, cult fiction, thrillers... you should read this.

[CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian · Rating 5 out of 5]

The only way for me to begin a review of Ottawa-born Sybil Lamb’s novel I’ve Got a Time Bomb is by saying it’s the strangest, most unique book I’ve ever read, and I have no fucking clue how to review it. I think both Sybils (the author and main character share a name, among other similarities) would take this as a compliment, though, so here we go....

Sybil is the anti-heroine that you learn to love: she’s a bisexual trans woman, she’s not above fucking you to get what she wants (you know, like maybe a place to crash), she’s the kind of friend who will help you burn down your own house if you want to, and she’s charming as hell (when she wants to be)—“she acted like charm was a minimum wage job she had to hold down 38 hours a week”—when she’s not acting like a self-proclaimed crazy bitch. She spends a lot of her travelling time looking for

"The kind of people who would still let you hang out if you had brain damage and a 3-second attention span and sometimes forgot how doors worked and had 1 or 2 tiny yet epically absurd delusions a day, accumulating like an abscess of crazy right behind your dead left eye."

As you can see, Lamb’s writing is really stunning, amazing and poetic and impressively fresh, but not in a show-offy way at all. Also, funny as hell sometimes. Like, here’s her description of a brothel/strip joint in “Salt Plain City”:

"The saloon was really, actually, seriously named the Fuck & Suck Saloon. At 10 A.M. at the Fuck & Suck, there was a motley crew of pansexual orientations and identities with every ethnic background and body politic represented so thoroughly that their team roll call sounded like a pamphlet from a progressive liberal arts college..."

See the full review here: https://caseythecanadianlesbrarian.wo...

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

The dictionary definition of “insane [affectionate]”. A baffling and tender and bizarre journey through an uncannily familiar apocalyptic world alongside Sybil, a Mad, brain-damaged trans girl with so much love in her heart and so many problems. Sissy was my favorite character and I wish she had appeared sooner in the text. Still, what a glorious achievement and an ambivalent + powerful tribute to the fuckedupness of trans/Mad/kinky/leftist communities.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Okay what! Hahaha. I love this book.

Sample: "Syb left the burbling gas can in the sand and stashed the other ones under a scrap of canvas to be dusted with the sand-plain winds. Then she wrapped a dampened bandanna over her mouth and set out to walk the few miles back into Salt Plain City.

"By the time she arrived she had a saltsicle growing like a psychedelic bass player goatee on her chin. Every breath in the salt plains gives you 0.03% of your daily recommended intake of sodium. It was 10 am. She'd been awake for 24 hours and she'd been fighting with Cake since 6 am. Just during those 4 hours she had breathed in 100% of the salt she needed for the day. Maybe a lil more...." (164)

So the drugs and zaniness did start to sag for me in the last third but then there'd be some brilliant aside that brought me back. Would describe style/sequencing like early Michelle Tea crossed with Kathy Acker plus a bit of Fury Road and some kind of hot pink vomit / chemical trace. It's an episodic trans punk novel with slapstick drug humor and lots of love.

All the talk around literary autofiction has neglected/undersold this whole strain of queer punk self-insertion. Move over Ben Lerner, etc.

[Arlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this was pretty great, the style is really interesting, hard to follow, hallucinatory, surreal and trippy which I always love. Very time and world bendy. I think the second half wasn't as good as the first, I get a little bored of long scenes about taking drugs and there were a few. I really enjoy the way she writes details about bodies and the ways the dialogue was written was the best part for me.

[Ross Williamson · Rating 5 out of 5]

aaaaah!! sybil lamb is so, so, so perfect. like.. people you want to be, for real.

this book is crazy. it's so refreshing to see a trans narrative that's a narrative instead of, like, a sad lgbtq archetype or something. and sybil - or should i say sterile? - just blows me away. the most striking scenes are perhaps either the incident itself or when sybil and a friend shoot up - estrogen.

it took me a while to finish, maybe because of the somewhat cyclical nature of the narrative, but i'm really glad i did.

[Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

I knew when I started reading this book that it was going to be crazy surreal fun. What I didn't know was how tragic and moving it was going to be. Totally brilliant and overwhelming.

[Michelle Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was wild. The back-cover doesn't really give a good description of what this book is about, and there aren't as nearly many reviews and ratings on here as there should be, so I'll try based on my impressions: This isn't really a novel with a story arc. It's a series of rough-cut slices of life from a post-Katrina New Orleans, to the mountains of Tennessee, to the Toronto underground. I've Got a Time Bomb is like meeting someone at a party who randomly pulls out an outrageous anecdote like it's nothing, then another, and another, until you realize they are one of the most interesting people you've ever met, and that they're also really high right now. This book is like Kino's Journey crossed with The Big Lebowski but instead of The Dude it's a gutterpunk trans girl, and we're all just along for the ride. The characters were both real and vivid, and absolutely unreal at the same time.

That said, there is a lot of heavy content in this book (see trigger warnings listed below) and it's not always a fun ride. I spent a lot of time puzzling over why I couldn't put it down regardless compared to other books I've read recently with heavy content. And maybe it's just the difference between 2020 and 2021, the sheer utter queer survivalist energy of this book, or maybe the slightly irreverent and absurdist tone.

Oh, and the ART! The art included in each chapter really added a lot to the already bizarre tone and events happening.

Not everyone will like this book. There's not a lot of narrative structure. There are weird spellings and run-on paragraphs. Sometimes the scenes drag on a little long. And not everyone has to like this book! Especially since a lot of the content could be triggering, which is why I hesitate to recommend it without some warnings. But I really enjoyed reading about Sybil's adventures, good and harrowing, and I hope she's doing ok now.

Representation notes: Extremely queer. Focuses on trans and queer women, with a few shitty dudes thrown in for variety, and queer community. Main characters are white for the most part.

Trigger Warnings: Transphobic violence, general transphobia, homophobia, dubious consent/coerced sex/sex under the influence, heavy drug use, anorexia (pro-ana), suicide ideation, general depiction of TBI impacts

[I. Merey]

Strange and I love strange, but it is nonetheless not strange in the way that I like. That is much a me problem and I tried to shelve that feeling and get into a strange-but-not-in-the-way-that-I-necessarily-appreciate type of read, but about a quarter way through, I still couldn't seem to find my sealegs. It's odd; imagine if someone had cooked you a meal using all the ingredients you love, but somehow still managed to come up with a dish that makes you go ehh.

It is however a relentlessly different and following drifting queers around read, so I don't want to discourage anyone else from giving it a go. I was intrigued enough by the odd narrative structure and voice that I do hope to try this book again at some later date. Hopefully, whatever it is keeping me from liking it will have dissolved...

[Vivien Ryder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Daring hyper-surreal narrative describing a dystopian future america? a dystopian present america? a fucking wild ride alongside half dead, half alive, clever and confused protagonist anti-hero Sybil DeLye, as she scrounges for hormones, drugs, food and occasionally a change of clothes.

Get a better understanding of american geography by seeing it through her brain-damaged eyes.

read it. read this book.

[Kat Rogue]

I wasn't expecting a book in stream of consciousness style to be so well structured. I had a hard time getting through the last 20%, but that's a mighty feat considering this thing is 350 pages. This book pushes the boundaries of trans lit in wonderful ways. It's not just that the main character is trans, but it's also that she's a punk dirtbag surviving in a climate change fueled dystopia of near future Amerika. It talks about being trans and being cis without using the terminology. You *feel* like a dirtbag punk while reading it. I became so much more conscious of my clean bed and unrotten food while reading. It's balances fever dream surrealism with immediate, gut-punching truth.

It takes a little bit to get used to the lingo and general style of this writing, but once you're in, it's charming. And also brutal, while also being hysterically funny. This book is nuts and I highly recommend giving it a go, though I wouldn't blame anyone for not being able to make it all the way through. It's, like, also immensely sad, so be ready for that.

[Avory Faucette · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was hard to rate because it's so unique. I'm not a fan of either post-apocalyptic stuff or absurdism as a category, so it might be more like 3 stars for me personally, but I can recognize the coolness of it, and appreciate how unapologetically queer and trans it is. I think someone with a little more trauma honestly might find it more relatable. I do find the way it's both fictionalized North Ameri(k)a and not compelling, as you never quite can locate yourself as you go through the narrative, but it's eagerly familiar. Plenty of sex, drugs, and rock n roll, but in a queer nihilistic kind of a way. I haven't read On the Road, but I imagine this is what it would be like if you made the hero a trans girl and mixed in a bit of Naked Lunch.

[Con · Rating 4 out of 5]

sooo unique in the way its written and full of style. love a good “plotless” book & the themes of the trans disabled experience spoke to me!

[Emma Alice Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Not Really) Post-Apocalyptic Explosive Adventure

This book has a wild, post-apocalyptic vibe at first. Kind of Mad Max-y. Except the setting is Post-Katrina, not post-apocalypse. The main character, Sybil, even spends time cruising around in a crazy modified ice cream truck, and there is gas thievery.

The adventure follows Syb as she tumbles around through squats and whatnots, befriending or sort-of-almost connecting with various other adventurers, trying to connect or not trying to connect or failing to connect because of her damage or their damage. And when I say damage, I don't mean metaphysical, I mean literal, bloody brain damage, which Sybil suffers early in the book in one of the most intense passages. Through it all, she maintains a relatively positive outlook or, in lieu of that, a willingness to keep tumbling forward and not dwell too much on the damage accumulated along the way. Which isn't to say there isn't some heavy emotional business going on. There definitely is, and it builds up to a last page that is kind of crushing.

Stylistically, this novel is one of a kind. There's a crazy momentum in the writing that parallels the character's momentum. There's some interesting wordplay and sentence structure stuff going on, but not in a boring "I'm experimenting, look at me!" sort of way, but in a way that is totally aligned with the characters and action happening in these pages.

This is easily my favorite read this year. Now I need to scour for some of the zines this book was culled from.

[Tom Léger · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most unique books ever written.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sybil is brilliant and terrifies me.

[cool_veins · Rating 4 out of 5]

i heart sybil lamb x ∞ shields

read this book while train hopping across canada
,
she signed this dirty ole book of mine with a picture of us pissing off trains together lolz dirty ass lolz

[Jeanne Thornton · Rating 4 out of 5]

i want to go to all of these places very much (except Toronto) <3 / i want the sequel to come

[Corvus · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this while awaiting surgery and recovering from surgery and wonder if someone wrote it while having surgery.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have conflicted feelings on this book. There's a lot to like (from my point of view) about a dystopian punk trans (mostly) road trip novel which unflinchingly (in fact, gleefully) portrays sex work and the bar scene and squatting and drug culture and crime.

And in an age of a great deal of post-apocalyptic fiction, it's refreshing to read quasi-dystopian fiction whose world is very little removed from our own, and whose dystopian qualities need not be explained by any single inciting event or phenomenon.

An interesting quality about this work for me is that as troubled as the main character is, this is not a work in which a trans main character is constantly traumatised by her transness. This is not a work which dwells endlessly (or even more than briefly) on dysphoria, and so on. Entire chapters go by which would give one little reason to consider that the character might be trans. And that is refreshing.

One big caveat for me is that the book (being as punk as it is) is fraught with typesetting and copyediting errors. And it can feel difficult to commit dozens of hours to a book which an author or publisher could not be bothered to spend a few hours copyediting, before going to print. That did frustrate me. But it comes with the territory, I suppose.

All in all, an interesting, chaotic, quite unique read.

[Thomas Hale · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intense, weird, grubby, violent, emotional, frustrated, extremely jittery. A cross-country adventure across a mid-apocalyptic United States ("Amerika") full of mostly-good sex, mostly-bad drugs and a rogue's gallery of odd and exhilerating characters. Loosely based on the author's own life experiences, the protagonist Sybil founds and co-runs a squatter commune in flood-ravaged New Orleans, crash-lands in isolated mountain farms, drives across salt wastes in a ice cream truck, and plunges into a city underground of hustlers, artists and sex workers. Along the way Lamb's frenetic prose style gives no fucks about the reader's comfort or sensibilities, and every sentence is electric. There are strong themes here of finding love, finding a community, finding oneself - all soaked in transgender punk personality. The book is illustrated by the author, too: her grimy style and unflattering character portraits add to the aesthetic experience of the book. A hell of a ride from start to finish.

[asmalldyke]

Sorry, I've Got A Time Bomb, but you've been sitting on my shelf for over a year. I'll try again some other day.

I started reading this one because in researching the orange book, I was coming across Sybil Lamb's website somehow, and realised that this is the only other novel that Topside published, I think. Cool history, right? Orange book contemporary?

Maybe it's the length, or the style, not sure, but while I dig the faintly-apocalyptic nomadic life that protagonist Syb leads, and think she's neat, I also didn't understand much of what she did or why. Crushing on that one random lady, the titular time-bomb, and that was only a third of the way through.

I'll return someday and give this one my real, full attention. I promise.

[Nili · Rating 3 out of 5]

Liked the depiction of transness, relatable on the queer stuff. Was quite off put by the almost rapey nature of some bits. It constantly pushed me to that point of feeling uncomfortable reading it almost. Did find it interesting from a psychological stand point however. Syb is clearly unwell and has a very weird mindset. I find the fact that no character in this book is an inherently good person quite interesting.
The weirdest shit I've ever read, nothing I read beforehand about the book could've prepared me for the absolute madness it was.

[cosima concordia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sybil Lamb is an absolute legend and her wild trans punk road novel is unlike anything you've ever read. Based on her experience of being ruthlessly beaten and sustaining brain damage after being left for dead on the train tracks, I've Got a Time Bomb blurs reality to create a marvelous genre all her own.

[Eaton Hamilton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This smart novel takes the eponymous Sybil on a surreal ride through post-Katrina Amerika. Dis-jointed, drug-fueled, hallucinatory, Sybil is time-bombing her readers from the first page to the last. ‘I’ve Got a Time Bomb,’ out of Topsider Press, is an achievement of storytelling.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

“It was cuz of that guttersnipe bitch Sybil, that lil rat girlie who’d been everywhere and gotten herself killed a few times but kept coming back to life just so she could follow kids she had crushes on around and try their lives on to see what it would look like on her.”

[Erin Entrada Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strange, tragic, funny, surreal.

[Gwendolyn Reese · Rating 5 out of 5]

This felt like a rite of passage. I am changed.

[ira · Rating 4 out of 5]

strange and fascinating and funny and often sharp and brilliant but overstays its welcome by about 50 pages . Maxine I am beaming the first third into the past for u

[Travis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a blast, lots of colorful inventive language, especially the bizarre slang, and things are described in this wonderful surrealistic post-apocalyptic nightmare way. It does get a bit repetitive even before the main character suffers a traumatic brain injury that badly but understandably skews their perspective, but it thankfully picks up during the "Metropolitopolis" section but then that ends up dragging a bit, but otherwise still funny and arresting.