Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without booms?

Where would we be without good?

No, Tinkabird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Soverblatt.

This is Bookworm.

You know, most of the writers you hear on Bookworm have written three, four, five, six books,

and then every once in a while,

I read a book that's so interesting and so surprising to me that I invite a writer who's written a first novel. That's the case today. Joshua Mattson is the author of a short film about disappointment. It's his first book.

He's in, am I right, his late 20s? I turned 30 this year. Well, congratulations. And he wrote it when he was in his late 20s.

That's correct.

And it's kind of a doozy.

I wasn't prepared for it at all.

The book is written in 80 short chapters,

The Hero of the Book, Gee,

let's just say that he sometimes has different names, and he believes that

someone is stealing his identity, so the name we meet him by is not the name we leave him

with. Does that do it, sort of?

The narrator seems to believe that he's being possessed or otherwise controlled by somebody

...