All My Colors

February 15, 2019
A wannabe writer who's a real jerk writes a bestseller in an eerie fashion.There's been a wealth of spooky comic-horror novels in recent years, and this wonderfully bizarre entry from multimedia scribe and Emmy Award-winning Veep writer Quantick (Go West, 2019, etc.) definitely fits the bill. Set in 1979 in a small town in rural Illinois, the book concerns one Todd Milstead, an aspiring writer who is introduced in the first line as "an asshole" and is later described by one of the handful of people who actually like him as a "pompous, vain, arrogant, self-obsessed, rude bastard." He drinks too much, cheats on his wife, lectures his friends, and generally behaves as described. While the character himself is deeply unpleasant, it's worth reading to the end of Quantick's deceptive puzzle-box of a novel. The biggest change in Todd's life comes when he uses his eidetic memory to copy word for word a now-obscure 1966 bestselling novel called All My Colors by a writer named Jake Turner. To Todd's surprise, his copy of the novel, which he's published under his own name, becomes a runaway hit. The middle sags a bit with a painfully accurate portrayal of a book tour, but Quantick gives away just enough strangeness amid Todd's perpetual breakdown to keep the reader going. Following a divorce, Todd hires a seedy private eye to follow his ex-wife and her new lover, who doesn't seem to appear in photographs. Two of his friends die under mysterious circumstances, and Todd himself is stalked by an enigmatic biker, not to mention the weight of his own guilt over his massive duplicity and the certainty that he's sure to get caught. As a satire of the writing life, it's less effective, but as a twisty and fitfully funny episode of The Twilight Zone, it's a blast.A caustic, unexpected comic horror story in which the villain, as always, thinks he's the hero.

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March 15, 2019
Quantick's (The Mule, 2016) latest novel centers on Todd Milstead, an obnoxious and unpublished writer in the late 1970s, who cheats on his wife and is barely tolerated by his friends. At a party, while arrogantly displaying his eidetic memory to humiliate his friends, Todd remembers the novel All My Colors by Jake Turner, only to realize he seems to be the only person who knows it ever existed. As his marriage finally starts crumbling out from under him, Todd needs some source of income and decides to "write" All My Colors, since it's all there in his head. Throughout the writing process and the book's eventual runaway success, Todd is disturbed by bizarre events, from the demonic typing pace set by his own defiant hands to moments that blur the border between fiction and reality. Quantick ably sketches an unappealing but interesting protagonist swiftly out of his depth, and the slowly unfolding literary menace will appeal to fans of Jonathan Carroll's The Land of Laughs (1980) or of literary-themed horror in general.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)