Choose one of the following books to take to that proverbial desert island:

A. Naked Lunch

B. Anna Karenina

C. The Stand

D. The Bridges of Madison County

If you answered D, I’m truly sorry. But if A was your first or second choice, then chances are you’ll appreciate and enjoy Stephen Beachy’s latest novel, Distortion. It’s definitely not for everyone. In fact, I imagine casual readers posting rants on Amazon.com to warn others that this disturbing, densely poetic, and apocalyptic novel is a waste of their time.

Distortion is an ambitious and complex work that, at it’s simplest level, tells the tale of a young racially mixed hustler named Reggie, who crisscrosses America by Greyhound bus, becomes an MTV rap star, then returns to the streets. Around Reggie is a huge, tangled web of interrelated characters, all carefully and affectionately drawn. There’s Geena, the punk rock go-go girl baby dyke; Marvin Mason, Reggie’s fabulously wealthy, yet sinister Svengali; Roz/Rolanda, down and out actress/model and fellow bus passenger; Ruth, Reggies’s almost catatonic sister; Am, Ruth’s Laotian neighbor who proposes marriage to her; David, the HIV-positive avant-garde filmmaker with a fetish for black men; Lucas, the angelic, corruptible Guatemalan boy; and Aaron, a strange disembodied character who is presumed dead in a plane crash.

Reggie is also addicted to speed, so his travels and escapades are accompanied by paranoia and wild scenes of depravity (real and imagined), all rendered in some of the most volcanic and gorgeous stream of consciousness writing to grace the printed page in many years. Beachy is obviously in love with words and he goes for broke with long, elaborate passages tied to the narrative and characters by threads of shared imagery.

Yet dismissing these word poems as filler is shortsighted. Distortion works on a different wavelength from most fiction being published today. It gets you initially at an unconscious level, infiltrating your thoughts and presenting a world where the constant drone of TV news and MTV mixes with the hopes and demons of the disenfranchised. Like most of the characters in this novel, the reader has a hard time distinguishing reality from fantasy. Don’t fight it. Go along for the ride and sort it all out when it’s over.

Take, for example, the thoughts of Leslie—a lesbian in unrequited love with her neighbor Ruth—when Leslie shows up with a friend at Ruth’s door:

“Ruth leaning in the doorway, tousle-haired, in a ratty robe. Too confused to invite anyone in. That hour of the night when white powder blows secretly across suburban lawns in the blue moonlight of a dreamscape. Albino moths flutter like doomed popcorn around dim yellow streetlights. Monsters do exist, in the bodies of men. Those who have killed, or the long lost twins of those we have not. They’re enormous, with square heads like a tv’s, to receive messages from the atmosphere. For this reason, we live in houses and lock the doors, as if what wanted to come in and strangle us might thereby be stopped. It is a commonly held belief that the devil can’t enter your home unless you invite him. This is not true. Devils and men, they walk where they please. Leslie and Geena must wait for a welcome.”

There is so much going on in this novel that it’s easy to get lost. Beachy’s narrative and his skill as a writer, however, make these mysteries and confusions not only palatable, but necessary. He examines the distorted reality of drugs mirroring other distortions—how pop culture makes quotidian life less interesting and less real than the fantasy of stardom, how race and incest color sexual desire. Violence, disaster, sex, love, and cruelty ripple through the book like unscrambled broadcasts of a premium cable channel.

It’s difficult to describe Distortion without making it sound daunting. In fact, Beachy has written a compelling and often grimly humorous work. Pop culture references are everywhere—from the Planet of the Apes films to Sophia Loren, from Ben to Touch of Evil—lightening the tone even as they make subtle comment on the dysfunction of the characters. Though dense, Distortion is never boring. Any adventurous reader with a love for grimy and beautiful language will find many pleasures here and will, I predict, post rants of their own on Amazon.com, proclaiming Stephen Beachy’s novel triumphant and genuine and completely disturbing.

Originally published in San Francisco Bay Guardian, 20 November, 2000