Douglas Lain’s Books

Fall Into Time

Now Available on Amazon
From the back cover:
In these four stories, Douglas Lain explores the painful and mysterious chasms in the hearts and minds of people who want to break out from their lives, but find themselves becoming stagnant and self-destructive. Unable to escape or move forward, they lose themselves in the past and present, hoping for some insight that will lead them to a brighter future. Readers of Philip K. Dick, Donald Barthelme, and Kelly Link will rejoice in the work of Douglas Lain. Featuring: THE LAST APOLLO MISSION 09/11 was an inside job. What nobody knows, except for writer Paula Austin, is that Stanley Kubrick was one of the men behind it all. With help of Nicholas Cage, of course. RESURFACING BILLY In a near-future city where radioactive trash is seeping up through the soil, one man creates a chewing gum that just might solve the planet’s trash problem, while trying to prove to a Big Brother-like school that his son’s behavioral problems are completely normal before they mandate a lobotomy. ALIEN INVASION/COFFEE CUP STORY Aliens have finally invaded, but apathy has overtaken the planet and nobody seems to care about the flying saucers in the sky. The tensions in a young couple’s relationship rise to the surface as they discuss what the alien invasion means, or more to the point, what it doesn’t mean, in this satirical mash-up of alien invasion and realist “cup of coffee” stories. CHOMSKY AND THE TIME BOX A tech blogger travels back in time and becomes obsessed with a twenty-two minute period in the Chicago O’Hara Airport on November 16th, 1971, when Noam Chomsky and Terence McKenna nearly met. But nothing goes according to plan in his repeated attempts to change the course of history, which entail kidnapping Chomsky and subjecting hostages from the Chicago O’Hara to footage of Ronald Reagan.

Pick Your Battle:

your guide to urban foraging, hollywood
movies, late capitalism, and the communist alternative (a memoir)

due to be printed in 2011

“Pick Your Battle” is the title of a radical self-help book that was successfully funded through Kickstarter on July 13th, 2010. Using the foraging of fruit trees and blackberry bushes as the jumping off point, this surreal effort at self-help is part memoir, part critical theory, and part manual. In a time of peak oil, peak population, and peak insanity just stepping outside and getting to know the plant life in your neighborhood represents a radical break.
^{Do not consult your physician if you are alienated. Book includes tips and exercises for revolutionizing your everyday life. Never use as directed.}

Billy Moon: 1968

due out from Tor Books in 2012

In a society that has abolished all adventures, the only adventure left is to abolish society. -Slogan written on barricade, Paris, May 1968

We will all wind up with Pooh, in a clearer, more durable, new place. –Philip K Dick, Ubik, 1969

There is not much time left. The child is waiting for us, beckoning to us. We must hurry. -Christopher Robin Milne, The Open Garden, 1988

In 1968, when a campus rebellion at Nanterre University spread to the Sorbonne and then to the rest of Paris, Gilles Tautin remembered the stories his dead father read aloud when Gilles was six. While his comrades planned committees, and his girlfriend marched on the Renault factory, Gilles remembered a boy and his bear. Gilles wanted to change society, to destroy the system, but he wanted to dream it. The revolution meant that Gilles could travel back in time to those Sundays with his father. He was sure that if he brought the feelings he had then into the present he could change the future. In the tear gas, out on the Champs-Élysées, Gilles found a reversible connecting factor.

In Devon Christopher Milne was disturbed by the letter. It started out in English but drifted into French as it went along. It began as entirely dismissible and ended up uncomfortably central.

Christopher had received scores of fan letters since he’d opened the bookshop. Six year olds wrote him to ask about his bear. Adults who’d read his father’s books when they were young wrote to ask the same questions. Everyone wanted pretty much the same thing, and Christopher couldn’t give any answers. He didn’t know how to find the hundred-acre wood, and he didn’t know where childhood went to, or why it was so difficult to feel real joy. He received fan letters and he threw them away because the letters weren’t for him at all, but were really addressed to a boy Christopher’s father made up.

But this letter, Gilles’ letter, said otherwise. “Despite everything you really are your father’s son. If you want to escape him you’ll have to find something true in what he made for you, what he made of you,” he wrote. “Paris is about to explode, and as the little Pig said in one of your father’s stories, ‘It isn’t much good having anything exciting, if you can’t share it with somebody.‘”

“The Bear is waiting for you.”

Billy Moon: 1968 is a magical realist coming of age story and an alternative history. Through the tear gas and underneath the cobblestones Gilles and Christopher seek the Hundred Acre wood. A dream is gripping Paris and together they aim to shape it, and to keep it.

Last Week’s Apocalypse

Review from Christopher East, July, 2009

Douglas Lain started publishing regularly right around the time I started reviewing for Tangent, and I remember his stories clicking with me right out of the gates. His first collection, Last Week’s Apocalypse (2006)–is that a great title, or what?–is probably not for everyone’s tastes, but I found it a pretty remarkable book, its stories consistently funny, unsettling, inventive, and full of surprises. I’m not sure I always got the stories, but it never seemed to matter, and ultimately I wasn’t always convinced they were supposed to be gotten–they evoke and provoke, regardless. The prose is effortlessly read, often laugh-at-loud funny, with a singularly quirky tone. Even when the trees obscured the forest, I found myself simply enjoying the trees–its recurring themes and ideas, which include frequent musings on war, drug use, the nature of reality, mental illness, pop culture, marketing, politics, and consumerism, to name a few.

[Continued at Christopher East's Blog]
[Purchase from Night Shade Books]