One Worm

Can a young man sporting a gorilla-hair coat find a purpose in life in Cleveland's counterculture? That's the question that first-time novelist Kalin poses in this aimless trek through the after-hours clubs and body-piercing rituals of the urban postpunk subculture. Narrator Ivan Hay spends his days managing Bonnie's and Clyde's West, a used-clothing store that caters to the young and pretentious, and his evenings in Hell, a night spot renowned for its nude personnel and strange, hedonistic patrons. In brisk, episodic chapters that glare like strobe flashes, Kalin paints the amoral world where Ivan survives by boosting cars, extorting money from a corrupt lumber company and hobnobbing with a cast of subhuman, or post-human, friends who include a woman with two right hands, a lover with three breasts and a hulking bouncer perpetually outfitted in a Halloween mask. Although it strives to capture the disaffection of a generation that has little to do but be outrageous, the story bristles with disingenuous attitude. Ivan is less complex than confused, a man who coldly hunts stray dogs with a shotgun for fun but who bawls when rejected by his girlfriend. The relentless hipness of his social scene seems as forced as the prose Kalin uses to describe it (""The spores of potential are as big as bowling balls here""). Considering the by-now dated portrayals of Bret Easton Ellis, Douglas Coupland and other chroniclers of anomic youth, this tale of dead-end lives at the turn of the millennium will inspire deja vu. (Oct.)