As per usual with most of his novels, there’s a rash of disappearing characters, cryptic threats, violent snuff films, grotesque sexual abuse and a total lack of any positive emotion within the narrator (yawn).

Maybe we enjoy the secret thrill of watching a once-cute child actress blossom into a buxom sex-symbol only to get bloated on whiskey and cocaine and her own radioactive ego, left to crash and burn like a kamikaze bisexual and flush what’s left of her toxic soul down a shit-stained toilet. Maybe… but then again maybe not.

That’s right. You can now purchase and read the book that put Hank on the map, with his very name on the cover and a brief bio on the back. And it’s not only a bona fide work of fiction, but a damn good one at that.

Chapter 1
THE PHOTOGRAPH

WHETHER BEAUTIFUL OR TERRIBLE, THE PAST IS ALWAYS A RUIN.

When I look back on my childhood, my earliest memories seemlike artifacts from a lost civilization: half-understood fragments behind museum glass. I remember the spherical alcohol lamp that glowed like a tiny ghost, ringed with dancing blue flames, which hung over the dining room table of the house where I grew up. I remember the sweet, oily smell of coal smoke, and the creaking of horse-drawn carriages on the dirt road outside. Most of all I remember
the summer twilight over the mountains and how, on certain evenings, just before the sun sank below the horizon, it cast rays so luminous and golden that they felt like a solid, enveloping close into which a small boy could simply disappear. An intensity no light today seems to match.

A collaborative preview of the stories and characters in this issue of FORTH.

In his dusty office turned makeshift crime lab in downtown LA, amateur crime detective Morton Forthston squints to read the fine print through his grandfather’s magnifying glass in a room too dimly lit. Anonymously delivered by carrier pigeons through his apartment window on 7th and Grand, the three white, origami-folded notes that lie in his hands are sealed with the acronym, ACNAIB. He opens each to find a clue: the first written in magic marker, “Billy.” The second had come a few days later: “Bianca;” the last, “Noah.” Believing in circumstance over coincidence, he knows he is on to something, although he’s not quite sure what.