Yet, at the end of the book there is not a character, a line, nor a moment that sticks with the reader. And even though I saw every tale's end coming from within the first page (something dull, dumb, both, or nothing at all), within a day or two the tales’ narratives had totally vanished from my mind. I Post-it noted the tales as I read lest I would have totally forgotten all but three or four of the tales’ arcs. There is no surrealism afoot, no wit, no real grittiness - just undisciplined, sloppy, yet predictable stories about cardboard cutout characters that simply cannot exist in large numbers in one place. It’s sort of the inverse of what a daytime soap opera does - put a bunch of wealthy, attractive people in one place, where they all share each others’ beds and foibles.

Are there losers such as Pollock writes of? Of course, but there are one or two in each small town, not dozens upon dozens, and even the unemployed or overweight will dialogue with themselves. It will not reach Shakespearean soliloquizing, but it is far richer and genuine than this degrading, sex-obsessed (sex featured includes that with retards, children, siblings, parents, old men, inanimate objects, fetishism, homosexuality, and - well, we are spared bestiality and necrophilia), and worse - ill written, tripe.

Like the puerile filmmaker, Tim Burton, or like a male Mary Gaitskill, Pollock is constitutionally incapable of subtlety, and overdoes the oddities to the point of weariness. Along with all the aforementioned flaws is the knowledge that these repeated and multiple failures all point the way to the inescapable fact that Pollock is simply a very bad writer, not a writer of promise, potential, nor talent, who just has an annoying flaw or two.

Thankfully, after the serial killer novel bombs, and Palahniuk moves on, and the publicity machine beancounters realize they’ve wasted enough money trying to promote this one trick phony loser into a literary star, and move on to the next MFA puppy mill denizen, the generic Pollock will simply fade, and his books will be pulped and yellow, recalled only in the web search engines that will eventually record every syllable of cultural detritus from Gutenberg on.

But, while he still has his few seconds in the glow, be a responsible citizen and aesthete. Go to his nominal website, email him with condemnation, tell him what you think of his garbage, and, if you would, please tell him I sent you, as part of my continuing mission to rid the world of bad art, and the biases, sloths, and cronyism that creates and fosters it. It’ll be your good deed for the day. Cockamstiff (which is what Knockemstiff should really be named, since Pollock so badly wants to play the badass, dickwaving literary rebel) is simultaneously pretentious and pulpy, fast-moving and dull, ludicrous and predictable, obnoxious and pointless, but always simply bad. It is poorly written prose about paper-thin caricatures involved in plots that ten year olds would yawn to. Damn, I smell a Pulitzer!