Substack Book Release: Caleb Mannan's 'The Hong Kong Phooey':
Wherein I let you know I will be releasing my novel The Hong Kong Phooey here on Substack chapter by chapter in its entirety. God help me. Or rather, you.
It has recently come to my attention that I have forgotten that I used to be a writer. By writer, I simply mean one that writes words. I do not mean writer in the sense that one does it professionally, or even well, just that they do it at all. This has come up because people have recently asked me if I have been writing, to which I reply ‘sort of’. By sort of, I mean that I am always writing something - verse, mainly, but little tidbits bit here and there all the time. But I haven’t done the Lord’s work of writing in the sense of a novel, or a lengthy work of fiction, in a long time.
The reason people ask me if I am writing most commonly revolves around my novel Bust it Like a Mule, which my wife self published as a birthday gift to me many years ago. The book developed a cult following, as any 60,000 word novel with no commas about a rough drifter in the 50’s should. Most people who know about me being a writer know me as such from Bust it.
But Bust it Like a Mule was actually my fourth novel out of roughly six (give or take a bad novella here and there) novels I have written in the course of my life.
My first novel, Into the Nether, I finished in 2005. It was a Narnia type of fable that followed the four Hallow siblings into the underworld in search of their missing brother, and was written for my wife and her siblings after the tragic death of their 17 year old brother.
My second novel, a dark dystopian novel titled And There I Shall Retire, about a German war hero in an alternate universe where Germany wins WWII, I still think is my best. It was the most straightforward, poetic, and gutwrenching thing I have ever written. My third novel, American Son, about a young Navy medic just out of Vietnam who returns to his day to day life in Oregon, is probably my least favorite because I felt it was long, dark, overwrought, and lacked a clear direction. It was after this least favorite novel of over 300 pages that I wrote Bust it Like a Mule in just a couple of weeks in a fit of fun inspiration. Bust it marked a turning point in my writing - I was so sick of being a serious, insightful, brooding writer that used proper grammar and punctuation that I took off the gloves and punched myself, and writing in general, in the face, commas be damned.
After Bust it, I roamed the wastelands of writerdom, devoid of inspiration and language. I wrote a novella about a young girl who meets her favorite rock star, I wrote insane poems, I wrote billions of short stories, another novella, but the muse of my early writing career seemed to have left me.
And then 2020 and the pandemic and lockdowns hit. I was trapped inside, isolated from everyone but my family. I saw the news daily spewing out rage and terror and no masks then one mask then two masks then three and I snapped.
That’s right. I snapped, and thus, I wrote.
I wrote my 5thish (6th?) novel ‘The Hong Kong Phooey’ as a way to process the absolute insanity and heaviness that was the Covid pandemic. I wrote as a way to cope, to laugh, to poke fun at the universe. The idea first started during a conversation with my dad shortly after Covid was sweeping the nation. Dad, a Naval Corpsman in Vietnam, said of Covid ‘Reminds me of the Hong Kong Flu. I was in the military at the time, and we didn’t do much about it’. I had never heard of it. So I went to look it up. Dad had been stationed in Barstow California at the time the Hong Kong Flu broke out, and he was right - it ran its course, eventually killing 4 million people worldwide. I got a wild idea for a novel about a clueless young Naval Corpsman stationed in Barstow California during the most apocalyptic pandemic to ever sweep over the face of the earth. If you know me, you know I loathe people, including myself, taking themselves too seriously. I believe if God had wanted us to be serious all the time, He would have made us serious and not weird. But I am living proof this is just not the case.
All that to say that in the Phooey, I poked fun at everyone and everything, including myself, and even the craft of writing in general. I went back to my writing in Jr High, when I loved Patrick McMannus and wrote funny, unreal stories about my buddies and I playing football and getting into trouble. I even took one of my favorite authors, Kurt Vonnegut, and put that ornery old fart (or a facsimile thereof) in the Phooey under the pseudonym ‘Hans Vardian, Jr’. I threw everything, including the kitchen sink in this book - 60s comedies, dumb jokes, stereotypes, plagiarisms, metafictions, WWII regalia and the Cold War and the Vietnam war and every other thing in between. I’ve said that its Dr Stangelove meets Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and I still think that’s the best description I’ve come up with yet. It was a ridiculous, convoluted, thinly veiled critique of the modern human condition of fear, control, and the lengths we go to to protect ourselves over others, or force others to protect us through our fear. It’s also a critique of the modern writing that has lost its soul and brash rowdiness for formulaic, politically correct creative writing prompts.
And it was a masterpiece.
I am kidding. It is not a masterpiece in the slightest. It is sickeningly silly, and has tons of plot holes (I patched most of them up, but as Vonnegut would say: ‘So it goes’.). I encourage you to look for plot holes and report them to me, this will save me the trouble of an editor. Oh, speaking of editor - The Hong Kong Phooey has no such person, unless you count me, which you probably won’t after you begin reading. I have written every single novel without an editor, save my wife, who is unfathomably gracious and kind to read and correct my incorrectible nonsense. In all honesty, the Phooey had an outline, but my God, with the infernal ‘anti time time machine’ that shows up in the last part of the book, the outline became about as convoluted as a machine called an anti time time machine. But I digress.
In truth, all these facts about the Hong Kong Phooey are the very reason that I have chosen to release it here on Substack: it is so ridiculous, my merit as a writer cannot be judged on it (crosses self). There, I have said it. I have washed my hands of this thing.
I don’t know if this substack serial book publishing thing has been done before, and the publishing industry frowns upon ‘pre published’ materials if you want to get published in the future, but who am I kidding? Like the Hong Kong Phooey has a snowball’s chance in hell of ever being published. Or any of my other novels for that matter. Hence: I will soon begin to ‘publish’ my novel from 2021, the indomitable ‘The Hong Kong Phooey’ chapter by chapter, all approximately 33 of them, one every day (procrastination permitting) , here on substack until the very last chapter (which is actually a short nonsensical epilogue). OK? Ok.
Ok. I have delayed long enough. The first chapter of the installment comes out soon…. God go with you. And Me. (crosses self)
Caleb.
It’s about time!
Yay! I get to read it all over again.