Because the Nut Jobs Author offers something that the well-adjusted novelist cannot: certainty in the face of chaos . The sane novelist asks questions. The nut job provides answers. Ugly, beautiful, terrifying, stupid answers. When the world feels random—when politics is a farce and the news is a horror show—there is a perverse comfort in diving into a fully realized alternate reality, even a psychotic one.
As I finish writing this piece, I am left with more questions than answers. What drives authors to create? What is the relationship between creativity and madness? And what is the price of genius?
"Barnaby," Sterling said, his voice trembling. "I asked for a biography of the railroad tycoons. What is this manuscript about a paranoid Almond?"
"Excuse me," the fan said. "Aren't you Barnaby? That nut job author?"
When he woke up an hour later, the tweed jacket was gone. He was wearing a bathrobe. He looked at his laptop, but the words "Grain Tariffs" looked incredibly boring. Instead, his eyes landed on the bag of mixed nuts.
This author has found The Answer . It might be about time travel, the Fibonacci sequence in Shakespeare, or the fact that the CIA killed Kurt Cobain using a subliminal frequency hidden in a Barney the Dinosaur episode. The Systematizer’s book is not a story; it is a proof. The prose is dense, filled with diagrams, footnotes that refer to other footnotes, and a cast of characters that includes the author himself as a persecuted hero. Think on a bad week, or the anonymous authors of the Principia Discordia . They demand you see the pattern. And after 600 pages, you start to. That’s the scary part.
If you want to go hunting for the next great unhinged author, do not look on the bestseller list. Look in the following places:
But without them, we’d only have books that make sense. And who wants to live in a world that makes sense?
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