Punchlines

By Brent Taylor

A blonde, a brunette, and a redhead walk into a bar looking to buy cocaine... (Stop me if you've heard this one) Add two amateur comedians (or cocaine dealers, depending on your perspective), stir in a half-dead dog hit by a car, and garnish with what starts as an absurd quest to find an all night veterinarian and turns into two souls hanging in the balance (if you believe in that sort of thing). With these ominous opening auspices Brent Taylor offers his unique and blackly comic meditations on road trips, relationships, and religious experience. One couple works out their differences through physical violence while another driving through the night wonders if it is even possible to work it out. A young man with a suspended license driving his work truck gets it stuck under a railroad bridge; a young woman in college makes extra money driving for prostitutes; and a bartender cheating on his girlfriend finds his girlfriend's dog dead on the side of the road and has to break the news. In The Naming of Cats, the collection's centerpiece, a nameless narrator uses a connection with an overbearing friend of his ex's to get a job in a neighborhood restaurant in the city. He quickly develops an infatuation with the bartender there, and when he finds out these two women are roommates and looking for a third, he jumps at the chance to move in. After all, he has been on a friend's sofa going on six months. What he doesn't realize is that there is a drama unfolding, playing itself out between the two roommate's cats that will potentially land him worse off then he was before. In these ten stories, Brent Taylor offers a Molotov cocktail of a collection in the tradition of Hunter S. Thompson, Bret Easton Ellis, and Denis Johnson. Pour a glass of kerosene, pop open a chaser, and enjoy these stories on the porch of a house fire while you can. In the morning, there will be nothing left.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B08FST6NVJ
• ISBN13: 9798632067621
• Release Date: August 2020
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 214 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"