A morose barfly drowns his misguided affection for barely legal trollops in crossword puzzles and wells whiskey. But Murray Baron isn’t just a regular at Seattle dive haven the Kapital—he exists in the bar in perpetuity, days and weeks bleeding formlessly into one another, punctuated only by cock-crushingly banal conversation. When he finally literally unseats himself to save a friend’s life, the decision ignites a series of overlapping absurdist confrontations straight from the id of a 12-year-old. Murray’s fate seems to have been halved into either suffocating barstool inertia or outlandish hyperactive lunacy, and only a highly dubious psychic can help him revisit the pivotal adolescent event that put him in this very literal state of arrested development.

Impalements, professional athlete bludgeoning, highbrow fart jokes, grind vocalists in thongs, plus the triumphantly brutal resurrection of your favorite Michael Bay-raped childhood memory. It’s all in A Regular, the second short novel from Decibel managing editor Andrew Bonazelli (Mechaniks) and Vitriol’s first-ever “literary” release, in conjunction with Bonzo’s own Was a Man Productions.

English
120 pages