The Anomalies [Paperback]

The Anomalies is the story of five quirky nonconformists who come together to make sweet rock music in their small Midwestern town primarily inhabited by tiny-minded, walking stereotypes. Luster wants the ultimate form of the American dream--rock stardom--despite being a twenty-four-year-old man living in the ghetto with his crack-dealing brothers. Opal is a sex-crazed party machine despite being an eighty-year-old woman. Ember hates the world and wants to destroy it despite being an eight-year-old girl. Ray loves America and all of its inhabitants despite being a middle-aged, effeminate Iraqui soldier. Aurora is frigid and deplores young people despite being a sexy, Satan-worshiping teenager. And now these misfits have formed a band--a band so different, so utterly unpredictable that they might just be able to slip between a crack, rise above their small-town existence, tour the world, and in the process make us all reconsider our stale old conventions. After reading The Anomalies, sent in to us unsolicited and unagented, I called Joey at home, introduced myself, and asked him, "What are you, some kind of mad genius?" My initial reaction proved correct. Joey Goebel turned out to be only twenty-one years old, a fact I find admirable--given his achievements--but oddly disconcerting.--P.W. Since I was fifteen, my life has revolved around sending postal pleas to those mythical cities of California and then anxiously staring at my sad, stupid mailbox. I hate that mailbox. These pleas used to come in the form of demo tapes. Like the protagonists of The Anomalies, I idealistically believed that my only chance of attaining a worthwhile future and rising above my banal Kentucky existence wouldbe through rock music. In high school I started a band called The Mullets, a name meant as a slur toward the uncivilized people of my hometown who were proud to wear their hair short in the front, long in the back. The Mullets played throughout the Midwest for five years--an eternity in teenage years. After five years of the rejected demos and fruitless out-of-town shows that I've come to associate with punk rock, I decided to become a realist. I decided I would have much better luck as a screenwriter. As a screenwriter in college, I first learned of that silly, hopeful term "the query letter." Needless to say, despite my relentless querying, my relationship with the film industry proved to be one-way. And so when it was time to plead my case for this novel, I had something on all those crucial people who would read my query. The Anomalies is about how predictable people can be and how these people react when they encounter someone or something that is inconsistent with their narrow worldview. Your typical, predictable agent or publisher would naturally scoff at a quirky novel like The Anomalies with its oddball cast of characters and zero potential for becoming a Ben Affleck movie. Therefore, to reject my novel would be to reinforce its them. Only an atypical, free-thinking, risk-taking publisher would take a chance on something like The Anomalies. Whoever this was would inherently be the perfect fit for my novel (and me). Thanks to the open-minded rebels at MacAdam/Cage, I now giddily watch my mailbox anticipating not rejection letters but royalty checks and replies from those soap opera starlets whom I've attempted to entice with my fortunate status as "published author."