Conte pal and contributor to issue 6.1 Emil DeAndreis has recently had his first novel released by Blue Cubicle press. Titled Beyond Folly, it’s a witty and relentlessly unpredictable chain of short episodes that, strung together, catalog the travails of Horton Hagardy, a formerly budding poet washed aground on the shores of San Francisco’s substitute teaching circuit. Horton is a sort of Sisyphus on a journey that reads like a John Kennedy O’Toole version of The Odyssey; he’s constantly submerged in events, people, and obstacles to his basic sanity that are just outlandish enough to be fascinating, and tethered just firmly enough to the real world as to be deeply hilarious and troubling. He’s a guy who has sort of reached a crossroads that seems both deserted and uncomfortably familiar, in the sense that, if there is a crack, he’s managed to slip into it – an authority figure with no actual authority, in a career with no permanence beyond the end of the day, feeling gumption and talent shrivel on the vine of his advancing past youth into a world increasingly unrecognizable and indigestible. There’s nothing particularly hapless about his character or his tale, but following him down the rabbit hole of increasingly inextricable circumstance, beneath the humor and farce, there is something deeply revealing about our communal human nature being revealed in the telling.
We’re proud to feature one chapter of this fine book in our Conte Presents section, along with a short Q&A with the author. If that stokes your appetite, you can devour the novel in its entirety by ordering a copy from Blue Cubicle’s website here.