Bernhardt J. Hurwood, We Hardly Knew Ye

I just got a strange and terrific present from my old amigo Sean, who lives among the Ewoks on Vancouver Island. He was buying a trade paperback of The Invisibles at a used bookstore, and the guy there told him they had "the original novel the comic book was based on." And so Sean bought and sent me this groovy little pulp paperback, published in 1971 by one Bernhardt J. Hurwood, and called, yep, The Invisibles.

Now I think the bookstore guy was having Sean on. I've been an Invisibles fanboy since 1995 and I've never heard anything about this book. And frankly, if Grant Morrison had been inspired by a semi-smutty drugsploitation novel from the 1970s, I don't think he'd be shy about admitting it.

And yet... the novel is about a two-fisted psycho-pharmacologist, a kind of Indiana Jones meets Timothy Leary type, who acquires psychic powers from experiments with psychotropic drugs, and then uses those powers to fight a globe-spanning conspiracy of evil, and also to have a lot of uninhibited 1971-style sex. It doesn't strictly mirror the plot of the 1990s Invisibles, but the whole vibe just screams Morrison. So who can say?

(The vibe also screams The New Know Nothings, which adds another level of weird synchronicity to this. Sean was the original creator of that Mage campaign I just posted about, with its whole 1970s Gothic Funk gestalt. I only took up the reins when he traipsed off to Vanuatu. Yet he must have bought and mailed the book just days before I dragged that old game summary up into the light.)

A little googling informs me that the euphoniously-named Bernhardt J. Hurwood was a "sexologist, sometime film critic, coattail-jumper, and definitive Burt Reynolds biographer," who also wrote The Bisexuals, The Girl, The Massage, and Everything, and the long-running Man From T.O.M.C.A.T. series (from which you will surely remember The Ominous Orgy and The Dozen Deadly Dragons of Joy). See what I mean about the Morrison vibe?

My working theory now is that Hurwood—the name is clearly a pseudonym or maybe even an anagram for something—actually was Grant Morrison, who, while writing the comic in the 1990s, projected himself back in time to the 1970s and wrote the Invisibles novel just to play with my head.

Lucky Wander Sean

Speaking of cool looking paperbacks, and of old friends of mine named Sean, I also just picked up Lucky Wander Boy, by D.B. Weiss. It's a first novel, who knows if it will be any good, but it's about a guy in search of a surreal video game he remembers from his 1980s childhood, and the cover blurb says "D.B. Weiss does for video games what Michael Chabon did for comics." So you know I had to check it out.

My only regret is that it wasn't written by my other amigo Sean (who is not the one I was talking about in my last post). If anyone was going to write the Great American 1980s Video Game Novel, I always figured it would be him. Although Sean is actually Canadian, and as far as I know, the Great Canadian 1980s Video Game Novel remains to be written. So there's still hope, as long as Jim Munroe doesn't beat him to it.

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And speaking of friends of mine, go visit my friend Chris' weblog, if you haven't already. (Or just add the gammafodder RSS feed to your friends list.) He just started it and is lonely for comments. He's a techno DJ by night and runs a nuclear power plant by da— well, actually he does both those things by night. By day, I think he sleeps, or maybe plays "Crazy Taxi." Anyway, unlike me, he has more to talk about than just geek games and books he's reading.